Robert Frost’s “A Silken Tent” is not in any anthology that I know of, which shows that anthologists only read other anthologies: a form of plagiarism, if you will. There are reasons to despise Frost: the overuse of the “paysage moralisé,” the folksy pretence of a fake New Hampshire farmer, the antiquated diction. The worst aspects of his poetry are what attracts many readers to him. This particular poem is great, however, because it creates a wholly imaginary and artificial object: a silken tent standing out in a field for no particular reason except to be the object of the poet’s allegory. I am quoting from memory since I don’t have the poem in front of me: “She is as in a field a silken tent / At midday, when a sunny summer breeze / Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, / So that in guys it gently sways at ease.” Who is the “she” to which the tent is compared? The poet gets lost in his simile, taking us away from the phantasmatic figure of a graceful woman in a silk dress: “And its supporting central cedar pole, / That is its pinnacle to heavenward / And signifies the sureness of the soul, / Seems to owe naught to any single cord...” [The symbolism is a obvious, all the more so because the poet thinks he has to tell us what the pole “signifies.”] “But strictly held by none, is loosely bound / By countless silken ties of love and thought / To everything on earth the compass round; / And only by one’s going slightly taut / In the capriciousness of summer air / Is of the slightest bondage made aware.”

The silken tent is the sonnet itself: an allegory of its own artifice. The poem appears labored in its almost too perfect construction. The cedar pole can only remain standing because of the ropes: yet no particular tie seems wholly necessary. The allegory of freedom and bondage brings to mind Wordsworth’s “Scorn not the sonnet” and “Nuns fret not...”