로버트 프로스트의 시에서 재현되는 워즈워스와 콜리지의 언어적 실험

Abstract

There is a strong case for reading Robert Frost's “The Most of It” in terms of its noticeable linguistic kinship with William Wordsworth's “There was a Boy” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” It comes under the spell of the Romantic precursors' ways with language. Frost's reference of “it” might be the poem of Wordsworth. The two poems are working with a parable of echo and their symmetrical structures reiterate what is implied in all literary endeavors--what it means to be the original. Each of the speakers of the poems fails to receive what they sought as a response. They instead happen to get something beyond their scope of domestication. The very beginning of Part two of “The Rime of Ancient Mariner” is a discontinuous weave of many codes of figural transference. In the Coleridge's poem, the unnameable “something in the Sky” undergoes a series of linguistic transformation and displacement until it finally turns itself into “the Spectre-ship,” which is another displaced name for an undecidable object. This undoing process of naming also occurs in Frost's “The Most of It.” In it, what the unidentified speaker gets as a response is something that cannot be nameable, such as “it,” the “embodiment” (as opposed to body) and “as a great buck” (as opposed to a buck). The two poems testify to the fact that a linguistic trope cannot identify the thing it refers to. Finally, this way of different poems' talking back to one another under the poetic genealogy makes up a thematic issue of “Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same” by Frost himself.