Free Essay About The Boundary Between The Known And Unknown World In Frosts Subverted Flower

The world can be a dangerous place. The invention of civilization was how human beings escaped from the constant danger of the wilds and began to live in lives of comfort and protection. But the natural has never been fully escaped. Woods border our cities and wild lands where there is the impression that danger lurks in the night. The poet Robert Frost wrote poetry that often explored this danger in the wilds. This is called Frost’s “Theory of Circle Of Security.” Everyone within a civilization lives within a circle of security. This essay explains the worlds within Frost’s circle of security and analysis his poem “The subverted flower” to show how the Circle of Security operates within this poem.
There are multiple worlds at work in this play as is characteristic of the philosophy in many of Frost’s poetry. There is The Known world. This is the familiar world of society that we understand and feel safe in. Then there is a gray area. This is the boundary between this world and wilder world. Then there is the Unknown World. The Unknown World is a world that we do not understand which makes us afraid. It is a dangerous world. It is the wild world of “brutes.” The point of view in this poem changes from the known world and entrance into an unknown world. The title of the poem and how the flower is described is crucial to this understanding of the poem. The flower is “subversive.” This comes from the word “to subvert” which means to undermine the power of. The male subject of the poem has subverted the natural world. But there is a deeper subversion going on in the heart of a woman in the poem.
Flowers are symbols of happiness and fertility. They are how plants reproduce. The beginning of the poem begins with violence towards a flower. The speaker says, “And he lashed his open palm / With the tender-headed flower” (Frost, 3-4). “To lash” is to whip, so this creates the image of someone whipping their hand against a flower, possibly damaging it.”
He then goes further, and tears up the flower from its base. Frost writes, “He flicked and flung the flower / And another sort of smile / Caught up like fingertips / The corners of his lips” (Frost, 10-13). As a man in the poem touches the wild natural world more, and tears up a flower, he is moving closer towards The Unknown World. He is leaving the rules of society and moving in for a kiss. Frost mentions what the corner of his lips looked like because this is clearly the focus and the fear of a woman in the poem who is on the threshold her Known World and her Unknown World.
Frost then develops an image of a woman and a man in the woods with the man slowly moving in for a kiss. To the woman, this kiss represents the boundary of The Known World. The closer he moves to her the closer she gets to The Unknown World. It seems Frost wants to communicate that this woman in the poem has never kissed anyone before. This for her is a doorway to a new world that she has known knowledge of. Frost compares this world to the world where animal instinct rules.
The woman is frozen and is afraid to move as she enters the Unknown World. Frost writes, “She dared not stir a foot / Lest movement should provoke / The demon of pursuit / That slumbers in a brute” (Frost, 28-31). The demon of pursuit can be thought of as the energy of The Unknown world. The Unknown World in many ways overlaps with the natural world, both our outside of the comforts of society. A brute is an image of a savage man. It is the image of a man before the existence of society. The primary drives in the natural world of brutes are food, shelter and sex. Sex is the theme at play here. The man is moving in for a kiss, but the woman is afraid because she is not sure how far he is going to go. There are no clear boundaries to where a person might go in the natural and the Unknown World.
She is still frozen but then after a man has kissed her she begins to feel ashamed of her leaving the Known World and entering the Unknown World of no clear boundaries. She begins to feel shame though only when a reminder of The Known world return. The woman believes that she has heard her mother’s call and that soon her mother will be there. This is when “She looked and saw shame” before her. She looks at the hand and sees that it was “hung like a paw.” Paws are an image, which conjures up the natural world. Dogs and wolves are much wilder than humans, and their feet are referred to as paws. Her mothers call from the Known World changes everything that is happening as the woman is on the boundary between two very different worlds.
After she hears her mother’s call, parts of the human body are referred to as their animal names. A hand becomes a paw. A mouth becomes a snout. The girl looks at a flower, pulled up out of the ground and begins to compare it to herself, for she feels that she has been plucked from The Known World.
The man she then begins to see as a dog, “Obeying bestial laws.” Bestial laws follow the energies of the natural world where the pursuits are shelter, food and sex. The poem ends in a scene with the woman dazed and her mother coming to wipe her mouth. It leaves the reader feeling like her journey into the natural world was almost unreal, like a dream.
Frost in his poem “The Subverted Flower” explored the dynamics of entrance into two different worlds. The subject of his poem was trivial, just between a kiss between a man and a woman. But there were higher implications to this subject. The man and a woman who are sharing a kiss, the girl’s first kiss it seems, represent two different worlds, the Known World and the Unknown World. The kiss represents the passageway between these two different worlds. The Known World is the familiar place of predictable rules and laws that we can trust and rely on. The Unknown world is the natural world of unpredictability where we never know what is going to happen next.