I have been absolutely salivating at the idea of sinking my teeth into this Frost poem. We tend to associate Frost with his familiar and simple poems: “Stopping by Woods,” “The Road Not Taken,” and perhaps “Mending Wall.” Even those poems can be mined for deeper meaning, but when you get to some of his other ones, well! You (or perhaps I) can go on just about forever.
Let me reiterate what I’ve said before in these posts: tearing a poem apart to analyze it may leave you with a dead, dismembered poem. ‘Oh, is that all it means?’ you may ask yourself. Or, ‘Oh, is that what it means? Well, I guess I was wrong about it.’ Always remember that if the meaning of a poem (or any other piece of art you can mention) can be boiled down to a verbal explanation, then there was no point in producing the work of art. There always has to be more to the piece than that. Your emotional response to a great painting, for instance, isn’t something that you can necessarily put into words. Knowing the different wavelengths of light that make up the colors the artist used isn’t going to get you very far. Much better to just stand there and enjoy the picture.
So these notes are simply an attempt to explain what the lyrics of our pieces actually say, with, perhaps some excursions into what they mean. And not much at all about what the words should mean to you. Just to be clear: there are three levels of analysis for any given set of words:
1. What does it say? That is, what is the actual sense of the words? Are there definitions that need to be ferreted out for obscure words, or explanations for obscure allusions?
2. What does it mean? That is, what is the seeming intent behind the words? If I say, “Boy, am I hot!” do I mean, “Boy, is my temperature up!” or do I mean “Boy, am I angry!”? Or do I mean, “Boy, do I wish someone would turn on the air conditioning!”?
3. What does it mean to me? Here’s where your emotional response comes in. If you grew up on a ranch in Montana and are therefore well acquainted with the night sky, your mental images of all these lyrics about stars are going to be very different from those of someone who has never been out of the city. Your associations and emotions will be much at odds, but neither will be wrong. They’ll just be . . . different.
Got that? Now we can proceed to eviscerate Frost’s poem “Choose Something Like a Star.” No, no, I didn’t mean that! Now we can explain Frost’s poem, at least to some extent, so that we feel a little more secure about the words we’re singing.
I want to first set down the poem as it is written:
“Choose Something Like a Star”
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud.
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use Language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
The poem falls obviously into two main parts as I’ve divided it above. The first, ending with the line “tell us what elements you blend” is addressed to the star itself, “the fairest one in sight.” That lofty, mysterious thing that is sometimes obscured by clouds but only revealed by the darkness—surely it has something to say to us mortals! It can’t be wholly “taciturn,” that is, silent. Surely it can tell us a secret or two about the universe, something we can hang onto! And what is the star’s answer? “I burn.” That’s it. None of the poet’s entreaties to get more information are answered. You can suppose that there’s a pause after the line asking about the elements. Silence.
So the second section of the poem concerns the poet’s reactions to the star’s lack of reaction, if that makes sense. The star doesn’t give us much help, which is puzzling, but it does say something “in the end,” after the poet has thought about it. We’d better stop here and define this “Keats’ Eremite” reference before going any further. Frost is referring to a poem by John Keats, “Bright Star, were I as steadfast as thou art,” in which Keats refers to a star as an “eremite,” that is, a hermit. The imagery is pretty clear: hermits were people who went off by themselves and had nothing to do with the world; the original meaning (from the Greek—aren’t you impressed?) is actually of a desert or desolate place. Stars are completely above earthly concerns and out in the wasteland of space. They never come down to earth.
Okay. So what does the star tell the poet in the end? That he (and we) need “a certain height.” We need to (in today’s wording) get over ourselves. We need to rise above the mob with its partisanship and extremes. (Hmmm.) We need something fixed, something like a star, to stay our minds on, to hang our hats on, and (therefore) to be “staid.” I’m sure Frost was perfectly aware of the modern spelling of “stayed.” “Staid” is listed as an archaic form of “stayed.” But it also means, in modern English, “settled and sedate, fixed and permanent, not capricious or flighty.” So, as we stay our minds on what is fixed and unchangeable, something like a star, we are staid.
Pretty cool, huh? And surprisingly timely. I ran across a quotation from Frost himself in a talk he gave at Dartmouth College about “extravagance” in which he talks a little about this poem, although I don’t have the context of the entire speech:
By that star I mean the Arabian Nights or Catullus or something in the Bible or something way off or something way off in the woods, and when I’ve made a mistake in my vote. (We were talking about that today. How many times we voted this way and that by mistake.)
Just fascinating to get a glimpse into the poet’s mind. But if that meaning doesn’t quite square with your own impressions (and it really doesn’t too much with mine), feel free to ignore it and go with your gut. I’m going to keep an image of a literal, bright star up in the heavens as I listen to this lovely piece.
Text of the poem “Something Like a Star” is still under copyright as of 2020. I include it here since this is free educational material and thus should meet the criterion of “fair use.”
