20 pages • 40 minutes read
Robert FrostWest-Running Brook
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Westward Current
“What does it think it’s doing running west? (Line 6), the wife asks, as if nature would listen to common sense. The current of the brook triggers the long conversation between the husband and wife. The direction west, because it is where the sun goes down and where night begins, is associated with the movement toward stillness, a darkness that invariably suggests death. Indeed, for the Egyptians, west represented the portal through which the soul accessed eternity.
The current suggests the swift and steady movement of time itself. Every moment, every second, marks the nearer approach of death. The west-running current symbolizes the awareness of the reality of death. Fred ponders the current and sees in its steady and unstoppable energy the ruthless motion of time itself. Fred is grounded in the material world—he knows exactly where they are and how to find their way out of the woods. For him, the eternal rush of the westward current defines the dilemma of humanity since the genesis of awareness: Alone of all species, humanity understands it must die.
The Curling Eddy
Fred observes the material world for insights. He points out to his wife the curious reality of an eddy in the otherwise west-running brook: “Flung backward on itself in one white wave” (Line 25). The eddy is separate from the current and yet part of it. For him, the contrast is striking and speaks about the contrary nature of any person.
The eddy disturbs and upends the current. It is a curly pocket of energy that heads eastward, opposite the stream. The movement eastward is the movement toward the liberating and inviting spaciousness of the open ocean. Unlike the movement westward, the movement eastward suggests a movement toward animation, an opening up to something greater, broader, deeper than the stream. That persistence of desire for the broader, the infinite line of the horizon, symbolizes our need for movement. Despite the certainty of death, humanity craves something bigger, something broader, something that defies endings and opens us up to a beckoning horizon. That tiny defiant eddy suggests that we are each immersed in the unstoppable current of time—“it flows between us, over us, and with us” (Line 58). However, a slender part of our awareness resists that flow and heads with heroic determination eastward. The current and the eddy suggest the tricky duality in each of us: The intellect that knows we must die and the spirit that is certain we will defy time’s limits.
The Ballet Dancer
In spite of its placement within the long monologue delivered by the husband on the meaning of life, the image of the ballet dancer is striking and unexpected.
The husband turns to the metaphor of a ballet dancer and the graceful arching movement of the pirouette to explain how life is both static and in motion. The pirouette is one of the most familiar moves in ballet: The dancer stands on a single leg, the other leg forming a kind of number four by resting on the knee of the support leg, all the while turning on the axis of the standing leg. The dancer appears to be statue-like, “forever in one place” (Line 51), as they execute the difficult movement. They spin on a single arched foot. It is a demanding, athletic pose in which the dancer is at once static, holding the integrity of the pose, but also giving in to the dervish of constant motion, the spinning itself.
In this image, the husband, as he contemplates the implications of a brook that goes in two directions, finds a metaphor for how life functions when time passes every moment and yet everything appears to be the same. The dancer reveals how time moves like a relentless current through day-to-day ordinariness. Each of us are like the ballet dancer: we appear to be going nowhere, lost to the tedium of everyday busyness, and yet we are constantly in motion, perpetually moving, each day a movement forward. That, Fred observes, is how life “seriously, sadly runs away” (Line 53).
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