Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Frost thus created a persona both for the sake of public approval and for warding off deep-seated, even suicidal, fears.

Francis, on the other hand, doesn't resort to self-idealized assertion. If Frost posits "a condition of vacancy" in his poems to ostentatiously resist it, then Francis is perhaps more receptive than Frost to a detached contemplation of this condition. He explores the "vacancy" by appropriating to himself the role of outside observer. Francis's "The Spy," from The Face Against the Glass (1950), presents this condition in terms of a consciousness that is dislocated from itself. The paradoxical situation that the poem describes is that of an unnamed man looking through the window into his "empty house ... in the moonlight" after he has left it, "spying," like a Stevensian snowman, "Upon the man who is and is not there":

To leave his empty house yet not to leave it

But make himself a shadow at a window-

Who is this prowler private in the moonlight?

Then at another window and another

His face against the glass and peering in-

What does he think he sees or wants to see?

Soft as milkweed floss the September night

White as milkweed the untroubled moon

Whose face, though far, is also at the window.

Two faces, but the prowler peers in deeper

Spying upon the empty chair, spying

Upon the man who is and is not there. (169)

David Graham suggests that the "man who 'is and is not' present is . . . the poet" (87). In his autobiography, Francis described the time in his life during which he was writing the poem as a "period of crisis":

I wanted to shrink into my psychic shell, . . . Night after night, soon after supper, my house became dark and inhospitable.... In one sense I was very much at home and in another sense very much not at home. (83)

(Among the crises he faced at this time were a rejection by Macmillan of The Face against the Glass and the financial burden he incurred when he decided to print the book at his own expense.) The profound isolation that defined his life during this emotionally trying period is imaged in the figure of a "prowler private in the moonlight" and in the "empty" house and chair. The vacant house into which he peers alludes to an emptiness seen from outside, which suggests an inner feeling of isolation.

To this sense of isolation, Francis adds a tinge of anxiety as his description of a picturesque evening lighted by the moon's "untroubled" face invites a comparison with the prowler's spying in at the window. In relation to the face against the glass, the moon's reflection is "far" from the prowler, a distance that intensifies his loneliness. Moreover, the glow of the September night, "soft as milkweed floss," and the pearly color of the moon, "white as milkweed," illuminate, by contrast, his condition of inward darkness.

As the poem concludes and the moon and the prowler are directly compared, the "prowler peers in deeper" than the moon. "Spying upon the empty chair," he cannot see, ultimately, through his inward darkness. Instead of demonstrating Frostian self-assertion and resistance to his condition, the speaker remains as he was at the beginning of the poem: dislocated and uncertain, at home and not at home, there and not there, in and out, detached yet paradoxically engaged in the act of watching himself, as if to see how he might appear to the stranger on the other side of the glass. Hovering on the outside looking in, reflecting on his emotional condition, the prowler is not at all the "aged" figure in Frost's "An Old Man's Winter's Night," who responds to the "out-of-doors" that looks "darkly in at him" by making noise, by "clomping" in empty rooms" and "beating on a box" (108), by resisting rather than exploring the darkness. Francis's achievement here of hovering, being both subject and object, being detached from himself yet contemplatively receptive to his "vacancy," defines the way he outgrows Frost's influence.