Dear Bruce, Craig, and Karl,
First, thank you for saving me embarrassment. Your distinctions helped me better describe the poem as indicative in mood (with the one exception of the relict of the subjunctive, which I had noted) but rarely tilted toward the kind of positive statement with which we associate the indicative (as WK Smart says; I could not quickly get my hands on Cambridge Grammar). The use of modal auxiliaries and hedges to qualify the speaker's stance--be it epistemic, dynamic, or deontic--is precisely what I was interested in. It was also a good caution to remember that these sentences are far from simple declaratives.
The poem can be read on a number of levels: pre- versus postlapsarian, Frost making use of the Eden myth to figure his love for either his wife or his secretary (whom he unsuccessfully wooed after Elinor's death). One point of interest is Jay Parini's suggestion that the source line for the poem's first line is from Hamlet : "So have I heard and do in part believe it," a line that Parini says Frost once called the most beautiful in English. The decision to alter hearing to declaring seems interesting, especially in light of David Crystal's discussion of the range of verbs, including declarations versus representatives: believe belongs to representatives, a type of verb by
which the speaker is committed, in varying degrees, to the truth of a
proposition, but declare belongs to declarations, by which the
speaker alters the external status or condition of an object or situation
solely by making the utterance (Crystal, How Language Works 277-78). Given Frost's larger poetics, which often explore the
implicit gap between the twothe failure of the speaker to alter the external
status or condition solely by making an utterance (the kind of power implicit
in chant and spells that Frost toys with in Mending Wall) or by believing it
(being committed to the propositions truth as in the penultimate line of
Mowing: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows (Frost, CPPP 26)])
strikes me as relevant here, although I'll be the first to admit that the joy of reading Frost is the freedom for us to walk away with different constructions of the text.
Thank you for taking time out of your days to assist me and to begin a conversation about a wonderful poem!
Natalie