Wednesday – Winter Solstice
This year’s winter solstice occurs at a time when the country anticipates a major blizzard, which promises to wreak havoc on holiday travel. For this bleak midwinter moment, here’s a bleak Robert Frost poem.
Forget about the loneliness of animals smothered by new snowfall, Frost tells us. And forget about feeling small when facing the vast reaches of interstellar space. If you want to truly scare yourself at the prospect of emptiness, you have but to look within.
Initially, I was puzzled by Frost’s symbolism. When I imagine staring into an inner abyss, normally I color it black, not white. It so happens, however, that my faculty group has been discussing Moby Dick, and Melville does something similar to Frost with the color white. In “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter, narrator Ishmael reports feeling a “nameless horror” at thoughts of Moby Dick before concluding that it was “the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Later in the chapter he elaborates:
Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows—a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues—every stately or lovely emblazoning—the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtle deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, forever remains white or colorless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge—pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper…
“[O]f all these things,” Ishmael concludes, “the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?”
I can well imagine Frost having this passage somewhere in his mind when he wrote his poem. Ahab’s quest is motivated not so much by revenge against the animal that deprived him of his leg but rather revenge against a universe that threatens to be about nothing more than death and annihilation. Similarly, for Frost, snow-covered nature proves to be nothing more than a metaphor for (borrowing from Ishmael) “the charnel-house within.”