Drawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter.

It took my mind off doughnuts and soda biscuit

To step outdoors and take the water dazzle

A sunny morning, or take the rising wind

About my face and body and through my wrapper,

When a storm threatened from the Dragon’s Den,

And a cold chill shivered across the lake.

I see it’s a fair, pretty sheet of water, . . .

It’s easy to see that Frost is borrowing from the rhythms and phrasings of day-to-day speech here. (“It’s got so I don’t even know for sure” sounds like something you might hear in a diner over a plate of corned beef hash.) But it’s essential to remember that no one actually talks like this—which is to say, no one actually speaks in elegantly varied iambic pentameter; no one spontaneously produces metaphors (the lake is “Like a deep piece of some old running river / Cut short off at both ends”) that serve the dual purpose of indicating the speaker’s imaginative resourcefulness and reflecting her sense of becoming psychologically “cut off”; no one intentionally delimits that display of metaphoric fluency by repeating a banal line (“I see it’s a fair, pretty sheet of water”) in a way that not at all coincidentally mimics the way a lake’s shores “cut short off at both ends” the deep water between them. Nobody talks like this; nobody has ever talked like this.

And that distinction, as Edward Thomas understood, was just as essential to Frost’s success as the extent to which his poems really do seem like speech. Imitation, after all, isn’t duplication. Frost didn’t intend to replicate the patterns of ordinary conversation; he meant to mimic them—and, more important, to symbolize them. But to symbolize talking—as opposed to symbolizing, say, the fragmentary nature of Western culture circa 1915—meant a kind of self-conscious reduction: a pose that would “at first sight,” as Thomas says, “appear to lack . . . poetic intensity.” If Wordsworth posed as a man speaking to men, Frost wanted to seem like a man speaking with men, and the people with whom we imagine ourselves talking are rarely figures of revolutionary genius. Rather, like us, they’re nothing special, or at any rate nothing out of the ordinary. One of the essential statements of Frost’s ambition comes in a letter to William Stanley Braithwaite dated March 22, 1915:

We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven’t been brought to book. We must write with the ear on the speaking voice. We must imagine the speaking voice. . . . I like the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it. Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have. The sense of intimacy gives the thrill of sincerity.