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Randall Jarrell First of all, of course, the poem is simply there, in indifferent unchanging actuality; but our thought about it, what we are made to make of it, is there too, made to be there. When we choose between land and sea, the human and the inhuman, the finite and the infinite, the sea has to be the infinite that floods in over us endlessly, the hypnotic monotony of the universe that is incommensurable with us everything into which we look neither very far nor very deep, but look, look just the same. And yet Frost doesnt say soit is the geometry of this very geometrical poem, its inescapable structure, that says so. There is the deepest tact and restraint in the symbolism; it is like Housmans Stars, I have seen them fall, But when they drop and die No star is lost at all From all the star-sown sky. The toil of all that be Helps not the primal fault: It rains into the sea And still the sea is salt. But Frosts poem is flatter, green, and at once tenderer and more terrible, without even the consolations of rhetoric and exaggeration- there is no " primal fault" in Frosts poem, but only the faint Biblical memories of " any watch they keep. " What we do know we dont care about; what we do care about we dont know: we cant look out very far, or in very deep; and when did that ever bother us?
It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesnt say it unpleasantly he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isnt there something heroic about the whole business, too-something touching about our absurdity? If the fool persisted in his folly he would become a wise man, Blake said, and we have persisted. The tone of the last lines, rather, their careful suspension between several tones, as a piece of iron can be held in the air between powerful enough magnets allows for this too. This recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation, is very rare and very valuable, and rather usual in Frosts best poetry. One is reminded of Empsons thoughtful and truthful comment on Grays " Elegy" : " Many people, without being communists, have been irritated by the complacence in the massive calm of the poem And yet what is said is one of the permanent truths; it is only in degree that any improvement of society would prevent wastage of human powers; the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation even of a life rich in intimacy, cannot but be felt deeply, and is the central feeling of tragedy. " from Poetry and the Age (Knopf, 1953).
Copyright? 1953 by Randall Jarrell Mordecai Marcus The once-neglected but now much-admired " Neither Out Far nor in Deep" focuses its nature symbolism so sharply on human concerns that its haunting picture tends to dissolve into a contemplation paralleling that of the people described. The initially detached speaker observes people by the sea who make a uniform mass as they gaze away from the commonplace shore toward the depth and mystery of the ocean. Few sights are visible; a ship rising on the horizon and a gull standing on the soaked beach provide contrasting images of hypnotic motion and uneasy stasis. Implied commentary having begun with " They turn their back on the land, " the speaker now philosophizes consistently.
The people turn from the varying sights of land towards the distances of water, representing mysteries they hope to grasp, though the water may not really possess any more such truth than does the land. But the people continue to prefer this attempt at further vision, just as they do at the poems opening. Despite their determination and persistence, they cannot achieve a penetrating vision of reality nature and human nature what lies behind it. But they will not stop looking.
In the last two lines, the speaker calmly withdraws, balancing admiration and skepticism, glad to see human speculation continuing but confident that it will not achieve much. The poem has been seen as a harsh commentary on human limitations, a charge Laurence Perrine answers by stressing Frosts insistence on the truly impenetrable depths that challenge human knowledge and the demonstrated capacity of the people to see part of the way as they strive to see farther (212). Similarly, Elizabeth Isaacs thinks the poet " joins forces with the rest of the human race when he climaxes the deceptively flat, calm poem with a grandiose, dignified ascent at its end" (34: 150). Randall Jarrell takes a middle position, granting the poem a certain unpleasantness but insisting that the conclusion shows " careful suspension between several tones, " making " a recognition of the essential limitations of man, without denial or protest or rhetoric or palliation" (98: 43). In an elaborate comment on the poem, Daniel Pearlman boldly asserts that it is a covert allegory expressing Frosts anger at the conformism of 1930 s American radicals who turned away from the solidity and complexity of their native shores to the monistic simplicities of foreign socialist ideologies.
Thus, the people Frost attacks do indeed fear to look out far and in deep. Pearlman supports this view with a close analysis of details and by citing parallels between the poems message and conservative views evident elsewhere in Frosts writings. From The Poems of Robert Frost: an explication. Copyright? 1991 by Mordecai Marcus. Peter D. Poland Robert Frosts cryptic little lyric " Neither Out Far nor In Deep" remains as elusive as " the truth" that is so relentlessly pursued in the poem itself.
The poem is very much " about" this search for truth, and scholars, for the most part, persistently maintain that such effort is both necessary and noble, adding slowly but inexorably to the storehouse of human knowledge. Suggestive though such an interpretation might be, it distorts Frosts intentions as a close examination of the curious image of " a standing gull, " located strategically at the very heart of this enigmatic work (lines 7 - 8, its literal and thematic center), will reveal. As " the people" stare vacantly seaward in search of " the truth, " mesmerized by the mysterious, limitless sea, they closely resemble standing (as opposed to flying) gulls. Never directly stated, this comparison, so crucial to the poems meaning, is clearly implied, and it works very much to the peoples disadvantage. For the gull is doing what comes naturally, staring into the teeming sea that is its source of life (that is, of food), and it is merely resting from its life-sustaining labors. " The people, " implies Frost, in literally and symbolically turning their backs on their domain, the land, to stare incessantly seaward, are unnatural. Their efforts are life-denying in the extreme.
Frost underscores the life-denying nature of their mindless staring by introducing not a flock of standing gulls, but a single gull only surprising in that standing gulls (or, more accurately, terns, which typically station themselves en masse by the waters edge) are rarely found alone. The solitary gull points up just what " the people" are doing and how isolating and dehumanizing such activity is. So absorbed are they in their quest for " truth" that they have become oblivious of all else but their own solipsistic pursuit. They have cut themselves off from the land world and all that it represents (struggles and suffering, commitments, obligations, responsibilities) and from one another as well.
They have become isolates, like the solitary gull that they resemble. Furthermore, Frost emphasizes not the bird itself but only its reflected image in the glassy surface of the shore; it is the reflected image that is the object of our concern, for it bears significantly on " the people" themselves. In an ironic version of Plato's Parable of the Cave, these relentless pursuers of truth have willfully turned their backs on the only " reality" they can ever knoweth land world and all that it represents and in so doing have been reduced to insubstantial images, shadowy reflections of true human beings engaged in genuinely fruitful human endeavor. Nameless, faceless, mindless, they have become pale copies of the real thing. All of this adds up to one inescapable conclusion: " The people" are indeed " gulls" that is, " dupes. " In their search for ultimate reality they have been tricked, cheated, conned.
It is all a fraud, insists Frost (for all that they do see is the occasional passing ship mentioned in lines 5 and 6), and he clearly holds their vain efforts in contempt. As the final stanzas make dramatically clear, they are wasting away their lives in a meaningless quest, for whatever it is and wherever it might be, " the truth" is surely not here. In short, they can look " Neither Out Far nor In Deep. " So why bother? The poem cries out for comparison with Frosts most famous work, his personal favorite, " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, " wherein the seductive woods" lovely, dark and deep" recall the mysterious sea of " Neither Out Far nor In Deep. " But the narrator of " Stopping by Woods" realizes how dangerously alluring the woods are. He realizes that he has " promises to keep, " that he can not " sleep" in the face of his societal obligations, and so he shortly turns homeward. " The people" of the present poem, however, continue to " look at the sea all day, " seduced by its deep, dark, mysterious depths. Turning their backs on the land world, their world, they have violated their promises; they are asleep to their human responsibilities, as their comparison to the reflected image of a solitary gull suggests.
For " gulls" they surely are. from The Explicator 52. 2 (Winter 1994)
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