This poem appears in Robert Frost’s 1942 collection ‘A Witness Tree’, and for me is one of the finest poems in that collection, which I think is the last to show his lyric gift at full strength. It came after a period in which Frost had suffered a number of tragic losses in his life: the death of his daughter Marjorie in 1934, his wife’s death in 1938, and then the suicide of his son Carol in 1940, and perhaps as a result it is informed by disillusionment and loneliness, and by an absence of consolation no longer to be found in the natural world, that the poet now sees as at best indifferent, at worst disturbingly alien and even dangerous. The image of the great buck at the end has something elemental, indeed almost demonic about it, and certainly it has no interest in communicating with the wistful observer.
Despite the reference to the universe in the first line it is clear that Frost was really talking about man on earth, but with the recent SETI initiative and the discovery of ever more exoplanets one can see the poem as having acquired an additional resonance since it was written. If there is indeed alien life out there, will it do us any good to find out, or will it be just as incommunicable and set on its own purposes as the great buck?
The Most of It
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush – and that was all.
Robert Frost
David Sutton 
I read this in the Cantabrian mountains at dusk, standing in one small spot where I could get a signal and listening to the clanking of cowbells. And that’s telling me? Probably nothing – except how sweet the air is.
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It’s actually a very sweet evening here too, but sadly no cowbells.
Hi David, I got confused by “it” in line six. Does it make sense to read “it” = the living (including the man in the poem)? Also, the “great buck” is the event that happens after his cry. Some people might consider the great buck the answer to his cry, the “counter-love” that he wants?
Yes, that’s how I would read the ‘it’. But no, the great buck might be the answer to his cry, but it’s certainly not the answer he wants: it offers nothing in the way of counter-love but is blindly intent on its own purposes. You can see the poem as a bleak denial of the ‘sentimental fallacy’ beloved of the Romantics. And I don’t think Frost, at least at that stage of his life, would have found much comfort in Auden’s philosophy: ‘If equal affection cannot be/Let the more loving one be me’.
Frost seems to leave the door open: “And nothing ever came of what he cried / Unless it was …”. If the great buck is an answer to his cry, it’s a magnificent answer. However, it’s certainly not a human love responding to another human love.
Alas, good rhyme does not a cogent intellect or substantial poet make. In Frost’s case it would seem to be the other way around. A would-be rational perspective forming the stuff of facile rhymes and arguably too many awkward rhythms. Frost, indeed. Give me the comparative ‘profundity’ of an Ogden Nash throwaway to this mealy mouthed poetic self-indulgence any old day. Cheers.