He dreamed of sentences stripped of their words, pared down to their “sentence sounds,” those “brute tones of our human throat that may once have been all our meaning.” Here the entirety of English has been painfully reduced down to six words, Frost’s three and Marjorie’s three. Though it feels cruel to notice it, you can find in this tragic last scene between father and daughter the primal elements of a Frost poem: that “counting out” and meaning-making by selection and “overemphasis” is his prosody in action. The last time I did that, the day before she died, she smiled faintly and answered All the same, frowned slightly and made it Always the same. The only way I could reach her was by putting my hand backward and forward between us, as in counting out and saying with overemphasis You-and-Me. She got little or nothing of what we said to her. Never out of delirium for the last four weeks, her responses were of course incorrect. The only consolation we have is the memory of her greatness through all. We were torn afresh every day between the temptations of letting her go untortured or cruelly trying to save her. But it was in a hospital she was caught to die after more than a hundred serum injections and blood transfusions. Marge always said she would rather die in a gutter than in a hospital. “Here we are Cadmus and Harmonia not yet placed safely in changed forms.” But the letter describing Marjorie’s final days, one of the most powerful Frost ever wrote, is itself a change of form from the raw distress that it describes: No longer reliving “the billow of calamity” that “Over their own dear children roll’d,/Curse upon curse, pang upon pang,” Cadmus and Harmonia are at last “placed safely in changed forms.”Ī few days later, Frost again wrote to Untermeyer, reporting that his youngest daughter and favorite child, Marjorie, had died of a postpartum infection. There, “The pair/Wholly forgot their old sad life, and home,” writes Arnold. Arnold’s version picks up late in the couple’s story, after the “grey old man and woman” have begged to be transformed into “placid and dumb” snakes, “far from here” among the grasses and mountain flowers of Illyria. On April 29, 1934, Robert Frost wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer that his “favorite poem long before I knew what it was going to mean to us was Arnold’s ‘Cadmus and Harmonia.’” In the original myth, Cadmus, founder of Thebes, and his wife, Harmonia, endure the deaths of their five children as retribution for Cadmus’s killing a serpent prized by the god Ares.