Robert Frost: Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length

One point to make about this title is that it certainly grabs my attention.  Usually I glance over the title, perhaps consider it for a very short time, and then move on to the work.  Not this time, for I really stop and contemplate it at length.  Why did Frost create such a long and unwieldy title?  It almost beats me over the head as  it says, "This is the moral, the theme.  I don't want you to miss it and, therefore, not understand the poem."  The intensity of  happiness overcomes its brevity is the meaning, or so it seems to be saying.  Anyway, here's the poem.

Enjoy



Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It lacks in Length


O stormy, stormy world,
The days you were not swirled
Around with mist and cloud,
Or wrapped as in a shroud,
And the sun's brilliant ball
Was not in part or all
Obscured from mortal view--
Were days so very few
I can but wonder whence
I get the lasting sense
Of so much warmth and light.
If my mistrust is right
It may be altogether
From one day's perfect weather,
When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.
I verily believe
My fair impression may
Be all from that one day
No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.


I find the syntax of the first seven lines very tangled.  Then  when "Were days so very few" appeared, I had to stop to go went back to work out just which days those were.  Each line is simple and straightforward in itself,  but the flow is rather murky at first.


Frost really stresses the point of this being, perhaps, one of those rare clear days in the following lines:

When starting clear at dawn
The day swept clearly on
To finish clear at eve.

 
The point seems to be that summer weather isn't quite as perfect as he remembers, and he may have been misled into thinking so because one perfect day overshadows many stormy, cloudy, rainy days.  It certainly seems as though that's what the poet is suggesting.  But, the problem is that this is Robert Frost and it's seldom as simple and straightforward as that.

"No shadow crossed but ours
As through its blazing flowers
We went from house to wood
For change of solitude."



As usual with Frost, the last lines of the poem frequently bring up questions or bring into question what appears to be the overall theme.  Frost tells us here at the end that there are two of them, something not even hinted at earlier.   "No shadow" suggests that it was a clear day and also that they were alone.  They did not go into the wood for solitude but for a "change of solitude."  They went for a different type of solitude, the kind found in the wood which was different from the kind found in a house.  And again, as usual with Frost, he leaves it up to us to discover or even perhaps to create those differences.