Intertextual Elements In Robert Frost's The Black Cottage

The Intertextual The intertextual elements or the voices of Frost’s predecessors are most clearly discernible in ‘The Black Cottage’ and ‘The Wood Pile’. The voice of the predecessor that is most prominent in ‘The Black Cottage’ is Wordsworth in his early poem ‘The Ruined Cottage’, the opening book of his longer poem The Excursion. Though Frost is very often hailed as an essentially American poet, in his early years between 1913 and 1914, he briefly stayed at England and became associated with the Georgian poets, who held Wordsworth as their poetic precursor and wrote in the romantic tradition of his. Frost turned to Wordsworth as a guide. The pastoral and the ideal in the British sage had appealed Frost as it appealed his English friends,

Henry David Thoreau, a Romantic and Transcendentalist, in his epoch- making book ‘Walden ’( that gives an account of his two years’ stay in a cabin in a wood near the Walden pond) touched upon the subject of the wood pile. He writes: ‘Everyman looks at his wood pile with a kind of affection.’ He also observed that the logs of wood in a pile would make him warm twice, one when he put them to size by cutting them down, and the second when ‘they were on the fire’( Monteiro 67). Frost was all praise for his work ‘Walden’ and once said that it contributed to his making. But here he has a feeling different from that of Thoreau. Frost sees the pile of wood during his walk and it interests him for it makes him forget the bird that flew before him: ‘And then there was a pile of wood for which/ I forgot him’ (Frost101). He feels the Thoreauvian affection, but it does not warm him or its maker twice. Thoreau sees the woodpile in all its positive implications suggesting an ideal. But Frost sees the maker of the wood pile as someone who ‘forget (s) his handiwork on which/ He spent himself’ and who has a habit of ‘turning to fresh tasks’. Moreover, he ‘leaves it there far from a useful fireplace’ that can warm a human being. Rather he lets it ‘warm the frozen swamp as best as it could/With the slow smokeless burning of decay’ (Frost 102). In the vision of Frost the woodpile tells a tale in which the human effort successfully brings order and beauty but they live only temporarily and fall prey to the decaying process of nature. In ‘The Wood-Pile’ the Thoreauvian voice and the Frostian voice are involved in a