Frost and Terror: "The Lockless Door"

Re-Size Text: A A A A Comment

RSS blog print

essay

N.S. Thompson

Frost and Terror: "The Lockless Door"

 

«««

 

      The Lockless Door

      It went many years,
      But at last came a knock,
      And I thought of the door
      With no lock to lock.

      I blew out the light,
      I tip-toed the floor,
      And raised both hands
      In prayer to the door.

      But the knock came again.
      My window was wide;
      I climbed on the sill
      And descended outside.

      Back over the sill
      I bade a “Come in”
      To whoever the knock
      At the door may have been.

      So at a knock
      I emptied my cage
      To hide in the world
      And alter with age.

          —Robert Frost

 

Much has been made of the liminal in Frost, of his sharp demarcations of opposing spaces—real or conceptual—and the effort the individual has to make (often through choice) in order to balance or resolve the opposing spaces in order to move on or gain some greater understanding. Frost himself inhabited liminal spaces and enjoyed a privileged status on the borders of many communities while not actually being in them, such as that of a creative writer in academia but not of it. This being on the edge of things was also a source of two great fears: that of the dark and of being alone.1 But from a much-quoted letter to Sidney Cox in 1927, we also know of another side to Frost:

      My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all set to trip the reader head and foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people could be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intentions we are speaking of—my innate mischievousness.

Thus, for example in “House Fear” from the sequence “The Hill Wife,” we have a poem that deals both comically and seriously with a division of two spaces into light and dark and how the tension they cause can be resolved. On returning home the couple allow an intruder the chance to escape unnoticed in the darkness outside while they light the lamps inside, a ritual the Frosts apparently performed themselves.2 Now there was something in Frost that loved a paradox like this, for all his recurrent depressions; and he also loved a little fun that was not always innocent.
  We see these elements combined in “The Lockless Door” and especially in the anecdote we learn from Lawrence Thompson (Robert Frost: The Early Years 18741915, pp. 206–208), who tells this story as a direct source of the poem. In the summer of 1895 Frost was staying alone in a forlorn clapboard cottage on Ossipee Mountain in order to be near his future wife Elinor (who was tutoring nearby) and one night there came a knock on the door. Frost awoke and—knowing there was no lock—leaped out of the window in fear and only then called out for the visitor to enter. Frost then spent the rest of the . . .
. . . . . . .3
[ subscribers: login for full text ]

 

__________________

1 I feel awfully afraid in the dark sometimes, especially after too hard a day on the farm [letter to James R. Wells, 11 October 1929].
I sometimes take it pretty hard to be left in a city apartment along with the night [letter to Louis Untermeyer, 28 November 1938].

2

    Always—I tell you this they learned—
    Always at night when they returned
    To the lonely house from far away
    To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
    They learned to rattle the lock and key
    To give whatever might chance to be
    Warning and time to be off in flight:
    And preferring the out- to the in-door night,
    They learned to leave the house-door wide
    Until they had lit the lamp inside.

The subject comes up again in “The Fear” where a couple return home late at night and the woman thinks she has seen an intruder lurking in the bushes.

 

3 Editor’s Note: This Frost reading is part of an occasional series of close readings to which readers are cordially invited to submit, either as a suggestion or a complete reading (5000 words maximum).