Frost Crossings L 31to transcendental permanence. But eather,�for Frost, is the principle underlying man unity with nature, his word for the x, the evolutionary dynamism, the chance, working against purposive development. Weather is what modern cognition exposes under all its metaphors, the law which all structures, inner or outer, must obey. Imagination then becomes a superstructure for articulating natural connection, not a vehicle for attaining supernatural connection. But it does not follow from Frost acknowledgment of metaphor and language as the enablers of correspondence that this correspondence is, as Paul de Man has said of Rilke, a rhetoric of uration rather than a rhetoric of signiation (Allegories of Reading, 49). (This might be true of Rilke; it is not true of Frost.) Why can we see the duck and the rabbit Language is a window, not a curtain. Here I am inclined to invoke Kenneth Burke distinction between a merely symbolic action, which has no praxis, and a genuine symbolic action, which becomes equipment for living. This tree may be a forebear of Frost witness tree, which he impressed, by violence, into service as a reciprocal sign of his own state of bondage, his proof of being not unbounded. In comparing o a Moth Seen in Winter�with ree at My Window�I have tried to show that chiasmus is Frost defense (however tentative or qualid) against the failure and fragmentation latent in the trope of apostrophe, a trope he almost never uses after ree at My Window.�The elegiac mood of apostrophe is displaced by the reciprocal completeness of chiasmus. Where apostrophe calls out to the absent other, projecting a union, but falls back into solitude and repetition, chiasmus forms a relation in difference and reverse mimesis. Chiasmus foregrounds the tional aspect of correspondence, the s if.�It does so not in order to subvert correspondence, but in order to sustain its relational structure. Later poems, such as those in A Witness Tree, incline to make he most of it.�The volume opens with the witness tree itself, eech,�which marks out a property boundary and as such dees the contours of a landscape.Where my imaginary line Bends square in woods, an iron spine And pile of real rocks have been founded. And off this corner in the wild, Where these are driven in and piled, One tree, by being deeply wounded, Has been impressed as Witness Tree And made commit to memory1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
