Spotlight on Neglected Worth: The Silken Tent

The Silken Tent, by Robert Frost

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when the sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 

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,

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To every thing on earth the compass round, 
And only by one's going slightly taut 

In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightlest bondage made aware.

Robert Frost’s superb poem “The Silken Tent” isn’t exactly unknown to most lovers of Frost. It sometimes makes it into the anthologies, although not nearly as often as “The Road Not Taken” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. Randall Jarrell did not include it in his famous list of Frost’s fourteen best poems, but it can of course be found in every copy of Frost’s Complete Poems. The poem is hiding in plain sight.

Why isn’t so extraordinarily beautiful and moving a poem better known?

The poem can be dismissed as a mere conceit: the comparison of a beloved woman to a silken tent. But poems of this type have become well-known and well loved; for example, Donne’s “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.”

It can be dismissed as a mere tour de force (albeit an astonishing one), for it is a sonnet (Shakespearean) consisting of a single sentence that moves effortlessly from an initial statement of the terms of the comparison through all the points of likeness. But the poem’s doing a difficult thing so easily can hardly seem to explain the poem’s comparative neglect.

The poem no doubt puzzles a certain type of reader who needs to add a haec fabula docet to the end of every poem that they read. But what does this poem really teach, beyond the fact of a woman’s being like a tent in certain respects?

I have carefully considered the possible reasons for this poem’s comparative neglect and have concluded who the hell cares. Back to the poem:

The poem begins with the only line in which there is the slightest dislocation of words from their normal order in speech:

She is as in a field a silken tent

This line seems to announce, by its slightly dislocated word order, that what is to follow will be an exercise in ingenuity, something cerebral in the line of John Donne and his fellow metaphysical poets. But with one slight exception, the word order in the following lines is perfectly natural and unforced. The contrast between the oddness of the first line and the flowing naturalness of the rest of the poem develops with a certain bravado, but a very subdued bravado, unlike Donne’s unapologetic kind. Ars est celare artem.

I read this poem several times, and thought I knew it well, before I realized that it is a sonnet. It is seldom printed as a sonnet, as I have done above, but that is not why I missed so important a feature of the poem. I missed this feature because in most English sonnets the form is conspicuous, and conspicuous for a reason: the sonnet form was not invented with the English language in mind..

The sonnet form was created for Italian poets, whose language has so little variety in word endings that rhymes can go unnoticed. The sonnet form makes the rhyme scheme intricate so that rhyming can become, in Italian, a matter of skill.

That was very well for Italian poets. but English poets, eager to show that they, too, could write sonnets, soon found that writing them in their own rhyme-poor language was an exercise of considerable technical difficulty. It is seldom that an English sonnet does not convey a sense of difficulty overcome, however gracefully. An English sonnet, then, is an exercise in bravado.

Frost’s poem “A Silken Tent”, however, overcomes the difficulties of form so easily that it conveys no sense of difficulties overcome at all. And that is true bravado.