A double meaning succeeds when it doesn’t distract from the story. That’s Wallace Stevens’ definition, and in his essay collection The Necessary Angel, Stevens praises masterpieces where the double meaning hangs lightly behind the interesting-in-and-of-itself storyline. My favorite Robert Frost poems are the short lyrics that do this, and I get excited when I see this difficult technique used beautifully in contemporary art. Juliana Gray’s “Bounded in a Nutshell,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and Getting On’s episode “Doctor Death” entertain us on a literal level during the first viewing, and reward repeated viewings with another layer of meaning.
Juliana Gray’s “Bounded in a Nutshell” begins lightheartedly, but the poem’s subject of grieving emerges halfway through, and only intensifies from there. The first handful of lines depict the speaker reading a novel on a couch beneath a fat cat. Kids outside the window are making a racket. Her mind wanders, comparing “what summer should/ have been” to the reality, which is that there is now a wooden urn on her shelf. It’s been there for a month. Here are the last six lines of this concise, 19-line poem:
“He’s not in that box,” I said at the service;
so why am I crying now? I haven’t opened
the urn, untwisted its cap. Is there a bag
inside? Is it sealed? Or are they loose,
sifting and reshaping like miniature dunes
each time I walk past, my head turned?
Why, why won’t those children stop screaming?
In the haunting last line, the neighborhood kids assume a new meaning. In literal terms, they’re real children shrieking outdoors, but in metaphorical terms they represent the unintelligible and unstoppable din in the speaker’s head. They are grief in its early stages, childlike and primitive, screaming in denial. Even if we want to, we can’t avoid facing a loved one’s death (“each time I walk past, my head turned”); the racket of our grief will break through somehow.
“Frost is most profound when he is most playful” says the critic Louis Untermeyer. This seems true in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where two of the four stanzas focus on the horse’s surprised reaction to the speaker’s unexpected stop on the journey (“He gives his harness bells a shake/ to ask if there is some mistake”). But the speaker wants to watch the snow come down, and wants to gaze into the dark, deep woods, which he describes as “lovely.” Historically, forests symbolize of a realm of death, so if the speaker finds them appealing, the woods are not only pleasing his eyes, but also tempting him away from earthly life. The speaker resists death’s hypnotic allure by remembering that he has “promises to keep,” perhaps to his family or his work. This poem is centered in experience, like all of Frost’s poems, and the specific reality roots the darker meaning.
In Getting On’s season-two finale, “Doctor Death,” Dr. Jenna James battles the deathknell to her studies and the death of one of her patients, whose physical situation mirrors Dr. James’ metaphysical situation. Dr. James transformed from powerless to powerful in season two. In season one, she’d been edged out of the main hospital and strong-armed into running the (lower prestige) extended-care ward. Despite this setback, Dr. James’ passion for research fuels her, and she cultivates her own funding through a partnership between her ward and a lucrative hospice program. But when the partnership raises eyebrows with Medicare regarding its ethics, her studies are canceled and she’s dubbed “Dr. Death” by the St. Louis Times. All of this is happening on a literal level. Dr. James has a meltdown in the episode’s last six minutes. She washes her new hair extensions (a physical manifestation of her new power) out in the hospital bathroom while muttering “I’m not Doctor Death” and then hurries up to the hospital’s rooftop. She’s followed by her ward’s two main nurses — optimistic, neurotic Dawn and centered, compassionate Didi, who gaze off the roof beside her.
Dr. James is physically saved from any suicidal urges by the presence of Dawn and Didi, but her soul was destroyed by the loss of her research. In the episode’s final scene, Dr. James attends to a dying patient. As it turns out, Mrs. Lee is still breathing even though her heart has stopped beating, which is a poignant metaphor for how Dr. James feels emotionally. After a long silence, Dr. James thoughtfully adds “She doesn’t know if she wants to go,” and then shakes the woman until her heartbeat returns. The nurses are scandalized, then awed. The season’s final image is of Dawn, Didi, and Dr. James giving Mrs. Lee an IV, warm blankets, and leg massages. Dr. James has brought her back to life, simply by urging her to live. Dr. James’s coworkers brought her back to life by not leaving her alone on the roof. And Mrs. Lee’s story is also a metaphorical reminder that we all experience deaths and rebirths in our personal and professional lives.
The double meanings in these poems and in this show work because the literal layer is grounded in a specific moment, whether that’s reading on the sofa, standing in the woods, or having a breakdown at work. The metaphorical levels, the second meanings — her childlike inner grief, his urge for silence and darkness, her half-alive soul — these are handled with a light touch, and emerge for the audience upon repeated views, which is a pleasure, as Stevens says. Here’s his description of such a masterpiece:
We are not distracted. Our attention is on the symbol, which is interesting in itself. The other meaning does not dog the symbol like its shadow…. we are not particularly conscious of it. We do not have to stand up to it and take it. It is like a play of thought, some trophy that we ourselves gather, some meaning that we ourselves supply. It is like a pleasant shadow, faint and volatile.