Coda

Abstract

This study began with Frost’s memorable description in “The Figure a Poem Makes” of how a poem unfolds: “It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad … ” (777). Through the various circuits of this study, I have tried to trace the ways in which Frost’s poems find their names as they go, ranging from gestures, both overt and highly suggestive, that closely resemble naming; to the more removed notion of the proverb itself as a means of naming; to the riddle, that subgenre founded on the playful yet identity-threatening requirement to come up with the name of an object; and from there to the consequence of these failed efforts: the final hope that the material presence of the poem on the page or its worth as commodity will somehow stand in as something like a name. It should be clear by now that this story of the poem’s unfolding applies also to the author. “[Finding] its own name as it goes and [discovering] the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad”—that story captures Frost’s belief in an accessible identity for himself amid what at times he must have seen as the debris of his existence; it expresses the necessary fiction that allows him to search amid the material of his art and life for that ultimate christening.