While a Modernist, Frost’s poetry has echoes of traditional forms from previous poetic periods. Through a dedication to meter and rhyme, his poems of “traditional themes use common settings to debate humanity’s place in a world of natural alterity,” examining within these the place of love (Cambridge History 520). Despite his “deliberately anachronistic” style, he conforms to the Modernist style of examining love and finding it wanting (Cambridge History 519). In “Wind and Window Flower,” he advises “lovers [to] forget [their] love” and listen to the story he has to tell of a failed romance (line 1). The brief romance between the “winter breeze” and “window flower” ends as quickly as it begins, with the wind “a hundred miles away” after the flower is unable to connect with his “sigh[s]” (lines 3-4, 17, 26). The inevitable failure of their love is foreshadowed in the wind’s concern with “dead weeds and unmated birds,” object distinctly connected with death and loneliness (line 15). Similarly, the window flower is paralleled with the “cagèd yellow bird” hanging above her, unable to reach out beyond the boundaries of the “pane’ of glass separating the two lovers (lines 7, 9).
Despite the somber subject matter, his use of meter and rhyme scheme in quatrains of ABCB is reminiscent of a children’s story book. This is further achieved through the almost whimsical use of the wind and a flower to represent the lovers within the narrative, a device used frequently in fairy tales– stories which traditionally finish in a “happily ever after.” The combination of these characteristics creates a cheerful tone which contrasts against the theme of lost love, calling into question whether a true love story is achievable in a modern world.
This contrast of beauty with pain continues within the poetry of Langston Hughes, famed founding father of the Harlem Renaissance. In “Love Song for Lucinda,” Hughes describes a “ripe plum,” “bright star,” and “high mountain” (lines 2, 8, 14). Each of these images, as objects within nature, would typically be associated with beauty. Hughes takes this assumption and subverts it in the second half of each stanza. While the plum is sweet, it leaves the taster with an “enchantment [that] will never let you be,” revealing the obsessive aspect of love (lines 5-6). The imagery of the star in the second stanza draws inspiration from the traditional depictions of the Northern Star as a constant, often used to symbolize the steady presence of love. Hughes challenges this portrayal with the “burning flame” of the star, arguing for the unpredictable nature of love (line 11).
The Cambridge History argues that Hughes “seems never to have attempted a full-fl edged love poem” throughout his career (718). I would argue that this “Love Song” is indeed a love poem. The lack of subject simply calls into question why Hughes developed this attitude towards love. When viewed in the context of the questions asked by many scholars, including “’was [Hughes] in the closet,’ or ‘was he gay,’” this poem demonstrates the dangerous nature of queer love in the Modernist period– when one cannot be freely open with their love, love becomes a source of pain that must be concealed behind a female-named subject (Cambridge History 717).
Give All To Love 