West-Running Brook

The poem is very much a poem of the Roaring 20s. People were exhausted emotionally and spiritually by the trauma of the Great War (it was not yet known as the First World War). Many in this generation felt that the Judeo-Christian notion of an all-knowing, all-wise Creator was absurd. They explored and delighted in the material world and sensory experience.

Frost, in forties, was too old to be an entirely convincing modernist. “West-Running Brook,” explores the existential dilemma about how to live knowing you have to die and the inability to entirely abandon the concept of a spiritual universe. Frost reflects two towering philosophers, that of existentialism and Christianity. Both inform poem’s metaphor of a brook able to move in contrary directions. The wife’s romantic and tender perception of a universe of profound emotion and deep spiritual significance reflects the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1874), particularly his conviction that the material universe revealed an all-embracing spiritual essence that unified and animated the material universe. His was an optimistic philosophy that celebrated how the material universe transcends the limits of what the senses can register. The husband Fred, however, reflects the philosophy of William James (1842-1910), another New Englander.