The Value of Fear: Why We Should Listen to Robert Frost During the Pandemic
It’s October 2020, and the President of the United States has just told us “don’t be afraid of Covid,” though he’s been infected himself, recently hospitalized, and clearly struggling for breath. Earlier today, I went to the grocery store, where what initially seemed bizarre — wearing a mask to buy avocadoes or 2% milk — now seems routine. The experience serves as an interesting study in armchair sociology, too. For the most part, people are wearing masks and practicing social distancing. A small minority, though, seem to delight in not following the guidelines, not only refusing to don masks but purposely going the wrong way down one-way aisles and ignoring the six-feet-apart markers at checkout. For the most part they are male. And they are either young, as in between 18 and 25, or middle age and up. If I had to guess what their Facebook timelines look like, I’d just check up on my friends who fit those parameters and have questioned the severity of Covid-19.
Isaac is in his early twenties. Recently, he reposted a cartoon from the “Being Libertarian” Facebook page of the Statue of Liberty sitting down, face in hands, her famous torch falling into the bay. In front of her and behind a fence, a man calls out, “But we got scared!” Philip, who’s in his fifties, has posted a meme depicting two scenes. On top, American troops storm Omaha Beach, captioned by “Americans In 1944 Facing Almost Certain Death.” On bottom, a man hiding behind a desk chair, wearing a suit and facemask. The caption: “Americans In 2020 Facing A 99.9% Survival Rate.” Further down Philip’s timeline, a painting of George Washington at Valley Forge bears the caption “238 years ago we froze and starved in order to defeat the largest military force on earth to build a free nation. And you surrendered it because you’re afraid of getting sick.”
While I abhor the posts, I’m fascinated by how they connect disdain for fear to American history. That version of history emphasizes a fictional masculine bravery, and there’s something about it I recognize from my days playing hockey in Pittsburgh, where I would earn more praise for “sacrificing” my body by blocking an eighty-mile-an-hour slap shot than I would for more skilled actions. Had I dodged a shot or an opponent’s check, I would have been ridiculed—by the opposing team and my own.
In America, then, fear isn’t just uncelebrated, it’s downright reviled. “The only thing we have to fear,” FDR famously said, “is fear itself.” In Saving Private Ryan, meanwhile, Jeremy Davies’ Timothy Upham, along with being squeamish, intellectual, multilingual, sympathetic, scrupulous, and disliked by his fellow soldiers, is a coward. And our cinematic time-traveler Marty McFly? The one thing that riles him more than anything else is being called chicken.
And yet, Robert Frost, the poet most Americans can name, the one who produced its most famous (and misread) poem, wrote a heck of a lot about fear — so much that the emotion seems to be at the core of his work, if not the core itself. What’s interesting is that Frost doesn’t write about overcoming fear. He writes about experiencing it and then making decisions based on the evidence. I’m not a psychologist, so I can’t say if Frost’s approach to fear is healthy, but as models go, Frost’s handling of fear seems far less likely to get one blown up, shot, infected, brainwashed, or forced to act against one’s will, making it significantly safer than the “patriotic” masculine approach of some of my fellow shoppers and Facebook friends.
Frost himself was supposedly afraid of many things, mainly the dark. Biographers have credited the length of his late-night conversations as strategies for ensuring he wasn’t left alone before sunrise. I’ve read, too, that he would ask others to open his door at night and turn on the lights. We see this behavior in a short poem, appropriately titled “House Fear”:
Always — I tell you this they learned —
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.
Reading poems biographically is a tricky business, one likely to get you kicked out of a literature seminar (though not mine), but this fear of darkness surfaces frequently in Frost’s work. In another appropriately titled poem, “The Fear,” one of the speakers says,
I always have felt strange when we came home
To the dark house after so long an absence,
And the key rattled loudly into place
Seemed to warn someone to be getting out
At one door as we entered at another.
There’s something passive yet wise to this home-security strategy. No running for the shotgun and standing one’s ground. Both passages suggest a metaphoric reading. In “Desert Places,” Frost looks at a field during a winter storm and sees “A blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express” and concludes, in one of the most terrifying quatrains in the language:
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost undercuts what seems like a declaration of bravery — “You can’t scare me!” — with something scarier: the idea that the real desert places are within.
In much of Frost’s work, then, the poet describes fear without offering advice for how to deal with it, which is uncharacteristic for someone who penned so many aphoristic statements. Describing the experience of fear seems like the point. “Once by the Pacific,” a sonnet soaked in apocalyptic imagery, concludes thus:
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.
Reading this, I feel that helplessness and personal insignificance that comes from standing under a storm. Yes, the poem has its metaphorical and imagistic pleasures. Frost compares “low and hairy” clouds to “locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes,” and as far as form goes, it’s a virtuosic performance by one of the language’s greatest sonneteers. But these qualities contribute to the description of fear, a fear, it’s worth noting, the poet felt at an early age. In his biography, Jay Parini connects this poem to the poet’s childhood in California where the young Frost would walk with his volatile father along the equally volatile coastline.
So much of childhood is fear, and as a father I often feel the need to protect my daughter from not just her own fears — bees and storms — but my own. “The Bonfire,” which appears in Mountain Interval, though, offers a different approach to fear and parenting. Addressing his children, a father begins with this invitation: “Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves, / As reckless as the best of them tonight / By setting fire to all the brush we piled.” The father includes himself as someone who will be scared, and it’s telling that the first line doesn’t begin with the act of setting the fire but with what seems to be the end goal: to “scare ourselves.” Fear again is the point; in fact, the father is courting fear, saying “let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.”
The children ask the father if he’ll really be scared. His reply: “Why wouldn’t it scare me.” There will be nothing controlled about this burning, and the father acknowledges he’ll be powerless to stop it. Scary stuff for children to think about, and the father does little to comfort them when he recounts a time he nearly burned the town down: “the black spread like black death on the ground.”
The father concludes his story by asking, “Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?” And they reply, “If it scares you, what will it do to us?” He doesn’t flinch. “Scare you,” he tells them. Then he gets to what’s really been on his mind:
But if you shrink from being scared,
What would you say to war if it should come?
That’s what for reasons I should like to know —
If you can comfort me by any answer.
What a reversal! It’s the father asking the children for comfort. Notice he’s not worried that they will shrink from war but “shrink from being scared.” The children seem to give him an out, answering, “Oh, but war’s not for children — it’s for men.” A lesser poet, and maybe a lesser father, would stop here and let the children comfort themselves with their innocence. But stopping here would be a lie. “My dears, my dears, you thought that — we all thought it. / So your mistake was ours,” he confesses. He tells them about “ships” and “towns where war has come,” and — this is heartbreaking — the “children in the ships and in the towns.” “War is for everyone, for children too,” he says. “The Bonfire” was written in the shadow of the first world war, a war to which Frost would lose Edward Thomas, his best friend. There was much to fear, and now the father has not simply confirmed his children’s fears but provided them with new ones. “I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t,” he says, admitting he may have erred — or at least worries that he has.
“The Bonfire” has two lines to go, lines I rank among my favorites in all poetry, but first I want to jump to another poem about war, “A Drumlin Woodchuck.” It’s taken me a long time to enjoy this poem. The trimeter and aa/bb rhymes make it sound satirical, if not childish, a quality enhanced by the fact that it’s spoken in the voice of a rodent. The woodchuck tells us about his defenses:
My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.
With these escapes in mind, he can make like “one who shrewdly pretends / That he and the world are friends.” Any sign of danger, and our woodchuck retreats to his burrow, diving “down under the farm.” Once secure, the woodchuck “take[s] occasion to think.” Then Frost announces his metaphor explicitly:
And if after the hunt goes past
And the double-barreled blast …
If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,
It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.
Our woodchuck is not a fighter. He doesn’t try to conquer his fears — he embraces them to survive. Because what matters to this woodchuck is “to be there for you, my dear.” He’s not going to put any idea or entity above the ones he loves. There are monsters out there, after all.
Undoubtedly, fear has destructive properties, particularly when aimed at a specific group of people, especially if they’re a minority and the fear is weaponized by a majority. But in individuals, fear also can be a powerful antidote to peer pressure and reflexive allegiance, cutting through the clatter of competing pundits and giving us, as Frost’s Drumlin woodchuck says, “The occasion to think.” Should we, for example, value the economy over our own well-being? Who benefits from our not being afraid — or at least our not acting like it? When we sacrifice our bodies, the health of our loved ones, the safety of our most vulnerable, are we being patriotic and brave or just plain stupid? Fear prompts these questions. It asks us what we value and what we should do. “The best way,” the father tells his children at the end of “The Bonfire,” “is to come up hill with me / And have our fire and laugh and be afraid..”