Close reading
Robert Frost's poem, "A Brook In the City", describes a city's violent process of construction over a geographical location historically occupied by a brook. The poem perpetuates the conception of nature as a defiant force struggling against the constant development of urban environment. Frost does, however, generate a tension between man-made and natural worlds that creates the potential for the emergence of a hybrid term such as ‘natureculture’; an esoteric, eco-minded neologism that highlights the inherent interconnectedness of these binary forces.
What is the significance of Frost opening the poem with an image of a farmhouse? A farmhouse is, after all, neither obviously urban nor natural, but rather caught in a sort of halfway point between the two. It is ‘almost-authenticity’, ‘almost-naturalness’, ‘almost innocence’ in comparison to the brook which is these qualities fully. Perhaps by opening the poem with an image of a farmhouse “linger[ing]”, followed by the question “But what about the brook..?”, the speaker is urging us not to mistake the farmhouse for nature, not to let this placeholder represent the real thing. This would make sense considering the following metaphor of the house being “held” by the brook “as in an elbow crook”, which presents the brook as somewhat of a parent figure or the ‘essence’ of the relationship. Sure, the farmhouse lingers (we might hear the speaker say), but don’t forget what has happened to the thing of real beauty and majesty that now lies buried beneath our feet.
The speaker is asking after the brook as one who “knew” it, a verb that is problematic. The speaker ‘knowing’ the brook in this context does suggest a sort of familiarity and amicability between human and brook, an anthropomorphised friendship. At the same time, to ‘know’ something slides quickly into ‘understanding’ something, ‘representing’ something, ‘commanding’ something, ‘dominating’ something. While a sense of playful innocence and vitality is generated in these lines through the verbs “dipped”, “leap” and “tossed”, and the brook’s agency suggested by the word “impulse”, there also does seems to linger in these lines a subtle sense of domination. Maybe it is in the way the speaker “made” the brook leaps his/her knuckle, or tossed the flower in to “try” its currents, as though the brook is passive and something that can be easily manipulated.
This sense of the brook’s powerlessness is reinforced in the following lines as the speaker describes the process of the city being built over it. In the line “is wood water to serve a brook the same?” the speaker is equating the tree’s wood with the brook’s water and so drawing a parallel between the fate of the burning apple trees and the brook cemented underground. The sibilance in “stauch”, “source”, “cinder”, “sewer” mixes with the assonance of the ‘d’ sound in “dumped”, “down”, “deep”, “dungeon” to create a harsh, thumping sound which accentuates the violence of the takeover. Suggesting the brook can still “live and run” in its new dungeon makes it sound like a vulnerable, wild animal, a far way away from the “immortal force” it once was earlier in the poem.
The final musing on the part of the speaker rhetorically questions whether the brook can ever really be ‘cemented’ down or whether it lives on in our everyday, busy urban lives in the form of guilt. It suggests that the city’s inhabitants’ domination of nature will come back to haunt them, more in a psychological sense rather than the physical threat of climate change we are experiencing now. This final image contains a suggestion of ‘natureculture’: rather than nature existing on one side of a line, and culture existing on the other, the relationship is better represented as a line with the endpoints glued together to create a circle.
