Wild Grapes (1942)

Frost once called this poem “as near being a thing written to order as I ever got.” He said that “Susan Hayes Ward my first discoverer (1893) said I must write for her a girls companion piece to ‘Birches’ which she took to be for boys; and she would furnish me with the materials. Some years afterward to my own great surprise I found myself doing as she commanded.”

Frost adopts the voice of an older woman in this poem, an oddity among his speakers. The poem begins with two questions—“What tree may not the fig be gathered from? / The grape may not be gathered from the birch?”—and sets off from there. These questions echo Matthew 7:16 of the Bible, which asks: “Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”

The speaker is a girl “gathered from a birch” who “grew to be a little boyish girl” who followed her brother about. “But that beginning was wiped out in fear” the day she swung on birches as boys do, ended up suspended from a tree bough like a grape, and “was come after like Eurydice / And brought down safely from the upper regions.” Eurydice was the wife of Orpheus, whom he failed to rescue from Hades when he looked back at her and so violated the command of Pluto on their journey back to the upper world of the living. When the girl in the poem made it back to Earth safely, she began to live “an extra life.” Now she has two lives: one she can “waste as [she] please[s] on whom [she] please[s]” and another, one five years younger.

The woman then retells a story of her youth, when her brother led her to a birch tree that was heavy with bunches of grapes. She recognizes the grapes from having seen them the year before, and soon there are bunches all around her, the “way they grew round Leif the Lucky’s German.” The reference is to the Norwegian Leif “the Lucky” Ericson, who was raised by a German and died circa 1020. He was a mariner who visited North America, possibly New England but more likely Nova Scotia, which he named Vinland after the vines he found growing there. The grapes are above the girl for her to admire, but they are inaccessible.

Here, as in Frost’s “Birches,” the boy climbs the branches of the birch until he weighs them down to meet the earth. In this case, however, the boy throws down grapes from the tree at his sister, and she hunts for and eats them. Then, when he lowers the branches, he tells her to take hold of the tree with all her might. She grasps the tree, but the tree takes hold of her when her brother lets go, and the birch lifts her into the air. She dangles like a fish on a line. Her brother shouts for her to let go, but she holds on tight. The speaker likens it to a grip she has inherited evolutionarily from a long line of women whose wild ancestral mothers “[h]ung babies out on branches by the hands / To dry or wash or tan.”

Frost paints another visual. The brother draws an analogy between the girl dangling from the birch and the grapes they have been picking from it. She is described as ripe for the plucking, but with one more stem, which makes her a little bit safer from the picker, a return to the opening metaphor of the poem.

The girl, dangling from the tree, loses her hat and shoes and still hangs on tight. Her brother urges her to let go and drop, assuring her that he will catch her when she falls. When she resists, he threatens to shake her from the tree, but she continues to hold tight. At last he decides he will get her down the way he got her up, by bending the tree’s branches back down to earth.

When the girl finds her feet touching ground again, it still takes her a moment to let go, as though she were hanging on to something far greater than the birch tree. Her brother chides her that she should weigh more next time (than, perhaps, a bunch of grapes, “[e]qually with my weight in grapes”) so that she “won’t / Be run off with by birch trees into space.”

The woman reflects that she was lifted in air not because she did not weigh anything but more because she did not know anything. She resolves that she had not “taken the first step in knowledge” and “had not learned to let go with the hands.” Even with the years past, she has still not learned to let go “with the heart.” It was her heart as much as her hands that held her in air, and she does not wish even in maturity to learn to let go with that any more than she did then. The poem closes with her concluding that she may still learn to live as others do, “To wish in vain to let go with the mind— / Of cares, at night, to sleep,” but she has no need to learn to let go with the heart.

In many ways “Wild Grapes” is the companion to “Birches” it was meant to be. Some of the images are the same, as is the resistance to being set back down to Earth to stay. This speaker, like the one of “Birches,” also seems to have wanted to “get away from earth awhile.” She too seemed to want to climb toward heaven, not to it. She is cast as a different swinger of birches than the boy of the earlier poem, however. She finds herself swung by them—she is passive in her role with nature. The two share something of the heart as well. The speaker of “Birches” declares that “Earth’s the right place for love” because he does not “know where it’s likely to go better,” and the speaker of “Wild Grapes” wants to hold onto her heart and never let go. But in many ways the image Frost presents here is traditional in respect to sex roles. The young girl is “boyish” in the first place, which explains her desire to tag along with her brother at all. Birch tree climbing is for boys, not girls, the poem makes clear at the outset. And she is dependent on her brother and described as being full of fear the day she “swung suspended with the grapes” rather than full of adventure, like the boy who was too far from town to learn baseball. Her brother must rescue her as a damsel in distress who is not in control of the situation. She is younger, but she is also the weaker and softer sex, and that depiction is evident. “Wild Grapes” is romanticized as is “Birches,” but the speakers of the two poems are definitively classified according to masculine and feminine traits. The speaker of “Wild Grapes” even refers to evolutionary traits, as though she inherited her grip from her femaleness, from mothering and raising babies in the wildest of circumstances.

The two poems are companions, however. They each have heart, and the boy and girl each strive not to let go of something precious. “Birches” notably has a darker side that is not evident in “Wild Grapes” and gives it a different tone. “Birches” is also a greater composition, flawless in its execution, its choreography. “Wild Grapes” lacks the depth and bite of the other, which comes, it seems, from a speaker who is a bit more mature and experienced, but also jaded. The speaker of “Wild Grapes,” while clearly grown, does not look backward from a position of old age with the same sort of disagreeable view as one whose “face burns and tickles with the cobwebs / Broken across it” and with “one eye weeping / From a twig’s having lashed across it open.”

The speaker of “Wild Grapes” concedes that she did not know “anything” and that she still does not want to know certain things. She is resistant to learning anything that will cause her not to go with her heart. The speaker of “Birches,” in contrast, knows too much but also knows something with certainty from the heart: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Robert Pack writes,

The old woman’s gift of her story qualifies as a Frostian “momentary stay against confusion” and a respite from uncertainty—not the uncertainty about ultimate meanings or the design of a deity who may or may not exist, but the uncertainty as to whether or not anything matters, like the love of nature, the physical world itself that the imagination may perceive as being invested with symbolic richness. (76)

“Wild Grapes” was first published in the December 1920 issue of Harper’s Magazine and later collected in New Hampshire.

FURTHER READING
Bacon, Helen. “For Girls: From ‘Birches’ to ‘Wild Grapes,’ ” Yale Review 67 (1977): 13–29. Bagby, George F. Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993, 114–117. Cramer, Jeffrey S. Robert Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical Contexts and Associations. Jefferson, N.C.: MacFarland, 1996. Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997, 198–203. Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College Press, 2003. Perrine, Laurence. “Letting Go with the Heart: Frost’s ‘Wild Grapes,’ ” Notes on Modern American Literature 2 (1978): 20.

Categories: Literature

Tags: American Literature, Analysis of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Appreciation of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Criticism of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Guide of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Literary Criticism, Modernism, Notes of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Plot of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Poetry, Robert Frost, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem analysis, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem appreciaiion, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem plot, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem structure, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem summary, Robert Frost's Wild Grapes poem themes, Structure of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Summary of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Themes of Robert Frost's Wild Grapes, Wild Grapes