West-Running Brook

The poem appears to be a simple conversation between a husband and wife strolling along the bank of a meandering stream in southern New Hampshire and ascends quickly into a dense and formidable discussion on existence. “West-Running Brook” uses the metaphor of a tiny stream whose current mysteriously runs counter to the directions of other streams as an opportunity to explore the nature of nature itself; the dynamics of relationships, particularly marriage; and ultimately the working of the cosmos.

The poem begins simply enough—the wife is lost. For the transcendentalists, who greatly influenced Frost, getting lost is regarded as the first step in enlightenment. Here is no exception. The husband assures his wife they are not lost—they need only follow the brook that, he knows, runs west. Here the wife raises the question that will serve as the starting point for her husband’s philosophical disquisition: why does this single stream flow westward when all the other streams nearby flow naturally toward the open ocean. This stream runs west, conventionally a direction associated with the movement toward sunset, toward night, ultimately toward death, the natural and inevitable flow of each person hopelessly caught in the flow of time itself.

The wife, a romantic, suggests the contrary-running brook represents their own relationship. They are opposites, and yet they make their relationship work, “the way I can with you—and you with me” (Line 10). She suggests that the brook with its contrary current, its bold assertion of uniqueness, can reveal the core nature of their relationship: “We’ll both be married to the brook” (17). It is a fanciful idea, revealing the soft and gentle nature of the wife. She notes in the stream an eccentric eddy that curls around a rock buried in the streambed. That peculiar, singular eddy, where the current hits and splits, actually defies the westward current by churning eastward in a sort of curly wave. It is, she says, as if the stream is waving to them.

The husband challenges the romantic notion of their oneness with the stream and as well the idea that the stream is somehow waving to them. The husband is far too practical, too rational, too aware of the material universe and its indifference, too defined by its physical makeup to permit even the pleasant illusion of the stream somehow bonding with them. For him, the stream is not inviting, playful, and welcoming; it is an unsettling symbol of the endless and irresistible flow of time itself. He distances himself from his wife’s perception. Only if they were transported to the mighty, female-ruled kingdom of the Amazons could her metaphor go unchallenged. The observation suggests that the husband views all women as sweet but cloyingly emotional. Beginning at Line 43, the husband launches in his own entirely one-sided reading of the stream, a dense and complicated meditation of how the stream reflects the contradictory nature of the cosmos.

For Fred, there is an essential contradiction of the cosmos. On one hand, death is inevitable, represented by the brook, which perpetually heads west. And on the other, a person’s spirit or soul or essence resists that inevitability and yearns, despite massive evidence that the world is simply and absolutely material, to touch immortality. We run west (toward death) but we dream east (toward illumination), the open ocean, toward vastness and eternity, a something not part of the material world. Not content with his wife’s winsome take on the stream, Fred announces he will “[g]et back to the beginning of beginnings” (Line 48). Fred is drawn to a curious curling eddy in the middle of the stream. He is certain it is a result of water hitting rocks that line the bottom of the streambed. As the westward stream moves over the underwater rocks, the stream itself breaks into eddies, the rock formation sending a current eastward. Thus, the stream both runs west and runs east. In this the stream is the essence of life itself: “It flows besides us” (Line 57), “it flows over us,” “between us” (Line 58). Time is at once the essence of our life movement and a terrifyingly oppressive energy in which we are helpless.

That suggests to Fred an insight into humanity and our position in that free-wheeling cosmos. Compelled to die, knowing we must die, we are gifted nevertheless with an awareness of immortality. The stream throws back on itself, resists its own steady movement westward, defies that raw and potent power. Yes, the body moves inevitably toward that moment of death. That movement westward, however, is mitigated by a person’s spirit; like the eddy curling eastward, the spirit defies death. Therein rests the husband’s tempered optimism: Awareness. In a cosmos where the husband sees the ocean itself will eventually run down, the sun will run down, indeed the entire material universe cannot survive, we yearn to touch something transcendent. Humanity is gifted with this curious ability (need?) to project a greater, grander reality: “It is this backward motion toward the source…/ that most we see ourselves in” (Line 74-75). For the husband, the yearning for the eternal better reflects our humanity than the body’s decline. We are a creature of contraries. Born and shaped by the current, which symbolizes time, we are able to tap into our spirit and defy the slow and steady movement to death. We do this by feeling eternity’s intense pull and grace.

The husband resolves that the power of the spirit against the fragility of the body will define his days. Thus, the poem moves from a narrative of a husband and wife to a complex epiphany about the philosophy of life against the reality of death.