An Old Testament Offering: The Origin of Frost's "Maple"

Abstract: Frost's poem, "Maple," raises three distinct issues: 1) What is the significance of the name "Maple" and of the circumstances contributing to the naming of Maple? 2) What is the significance of the phrase "wave offering" in the biblical passages where the maple leaf was found? and 3) What does the poem mean? My thesis centers on a biblical and etymological analysis of the Hebrew word for "offering" that is central to Frost's poem. The paper begins with an investigation into the Old Testament origins of this phrase and then analyzes the significance of Maple's naming and the poem's relevance to Frost's themes and previous poems. ********** Once, in his characteristic ironic fashion, Robert Frost referred to himself as "an Old Testament Christian" a phrase that Dorothy Judd Hall appropriated as the title for her fine essay. Hall quotes Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson as saying that Frost's religious belief "provides more problems than any other part of his art--and it happens to be inseparable from his art" (Hall 319). Thompson further noted that Frost came to be "actually soaked in the Bible" (319). Hall quotes him from a 1947 letter to Roy Elliott as saying: "My approach to the New Testament is rather through Jerusalem than through Rome ..." (Hall 323). Clearly, Frost's immersion in the Bible and its themes--especially in the Old Testament--greatly influenced his poetry. Indeed, a review of his poetry will show that Frost's religious belief is a complex amalgam of the Old and New Testament metaphors of justice and mercy as evidenced by his Masque of Reason and Masque of Mercy. Arguably, the depth and subtlety of his knowledge is nowhere better evidenced than in his poem "Maple" in which he uses an obscure theological term to describe the naming of a child. Written in 1920, Frost's "Maple" is a poignant and disturbing poem. Although it appears to represent an important philosophical statement by Frost, the poems critical status is notable only for the dearth of attention devoted to it. Lawrance Thompson, in his exhaustive three-volume biography, mentions dozens of other poems but not "Maple." The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, a great source for all things Frostean, contains a useful summary but doesn't explore the poems underlying meaning. There are one-sentence references by Johannes Kjorven and Arthur M. Sampley which describe the poem as representing "disbelieving lovers" who look for meaning in the "outer world" (Kjorven 171), and as typifying a "quest into the past" (Sampley 196). Yet, for a poem published in 1921 to have been analyzed first in 1972, and only a handful of times since then, reflects the fact that either the poem is not considered important enough or that its surface, like much of Frost's work, resists analysis. A catalog of neglect isn't necessary to prove the point other than to say that I have been able to uncover only four critics who have written more than a few paragraphs about the poem in the past eighty years. I attribute this to the arcane Old Testament reference in the poem to a "wave offering" which is found in 31 different contexts, while the contexts for "offering" total a daunting 350. Though Frost clearly points the way to the Old Testament, his own context is sufficiently oblique to make exact identification doubtful. Briefly, the action of "Maple" is as follows. A mother dies in childbirth and indicates to her husband that the infant should be named "Maple." While a child, Maple asks her father about the meaning of her name and he tells her that he doesn't know, that perhaps her mother meant to intimate that she "Be a good girl--be like a maple tree" (22). Not until much later, as a grown woman, is she again drawn to the mystery of her naming. Staring in the mirror one day she decides that "Its strangeness lay / In having too much meaning" (44-45). Once, when she finds a maple leaf "pressed" between two pages in the Bible which refer to a "wave offering" she reads everything on the facing pages without illumination. …