ASSIGNMENT 18:
Robert Frost, selected poems

The editors of our anthology note that Frost was nearly forty, in 1913, before his first book of poems was published, and it wasn't until his subsequent book, North of Boston, that Frost's reputation as a poet was secured for American readers. The important thing to note, however, is that many of the poems we are reading were composed much earlier, in the 1890s and early years of the new century. Frost had placed some of them in small magazines and newspapers, but never had he made a living from his writing.

The crucial moment in Frost's literary life appears to have been 1912. That year he sold the New Hampshire farm that had been given to him in 1902, with the proviso that he work it for at least ten years. Frost did so, but when the ten year period had expired he sold the farm and used the profits to move his wife and children to England. He left with the manuscript of his first book, A Boy's Will, in his luggage. In England he was able to meet William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, the American poet who championed Frost's work. The first book appeared, under Pound's guidance, in 1913; North of Boston followed one year later; and a third book, Mountain Interval, was written in England and ready for publication by 1916. Back home, Frost suddenly had a reputation; he was "New England's Newest Poet."

The years in England were enormously fruitful for Frost but the war imposed severe hardships. In 1916, the Frosts returned to America. There he was able to make a full-time living as a writer, teaching at Dartmouth College, Harvard, the University of Michigan and then, in 1920, at Amherst College, where he would remain for the rest of his working life.

For most readers during his time Frost did indeed seem the very image of The New England Poet: witty and genteel, but very much "versed in country things," a regionalist and agrarian poet who was known, in one critic's phrase, as "a gentle green giant." In this view of Frost he is like a throwback to the Jeffersonian ideal of the gentleman farmer, the natural aristocrat, whose genius comes from his moral education in Nature.

Yet Frost is also a modernist poet in other, equally crucial ways. Frost's New England is, if we look closely at it, far removed from unspoiled Nature. Instead, his is the New England of second growth forests that had come back, after the first wave of immigrants had devastated the northern woodlands. It is a forest reclaimed by Nature, after settlers have stripped it and moved on, leaving behind in these forests all the signs and relics of their depredations: stumps, felled and rotted trees, graveyards, stone fences, and the remnants of houses-chimneys poking up absurdly, amongst trees, and vast holes that once were cellars. This reclaimed Nature becomes one of Frost's great metaphoric territories, a symbol for the effort of the human imagination to recuperate what is natural, in a time when The Human seems to encroach upon every nook and cranny of Nature. Frost's speakers enter this abandoned human wasteland, inhabit it, labor in it, and produce crops from it. Such tasks become for Frost the imaginative counterparts of creative work, and writing in particular. Again and again in Frost, manual labor in Nature becomes significant in these ways.

Take his poem, "Mowing," for example. A sonnet, it is an unusual one, with an odd rhyme-scheme. Instead of the a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g pattern (three quatrains and a concluding couplet) typical of the English or Shakespearean sonnet, Frost's rhymes like this: a-b-c-a-b-d-e-c, and so on. It is a loose, informal pattern one scarcely notices; nothing is imposed, forcibly, on the rhythms of natural speech. Additionally notice the rhythm of the lines themselves. If we separate out the unaccented, and capitalize the accented syllables, the first lines look like this:

There was NEV-er a SOUND be-SIDE the WOOD but ONE,
And that WAS my LONG scythe WHIS-per-ing TO the GROUND.
What WAS it it WHIS-pered? I KNEW not WELL my-SELF;

Do you see the patterns? The dominant rhythm is that of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one (as in "the WOOD but ONE"), known as the "iambic" rhythm. In fact, this iambic rhythm is the dominant one in spoken English (try it), the very reason it feels so natural. Yet Frost's lines are also disrupted by another, scarcely noticeable rhythm: two unaccented syllables followed by an accented one (as in "it it WHIS-pered? I KNEW"), known as an "anapestic foot" in the parlance of poets. This too seems natural, but is indeed a hard technical trick Frost has pulled off in the poem, for anapests aren't all that common in ordinary speech.

Why would Frost work hard for such an effect? One answer is right there, in the subject matter of the poem. It's about the labor of mowing, with a scythe, and as anyone who has scythed down grass will confirm, the rhythm of swinging this awkward tool involves a certain step-step-SWING motion of the feet and body. This is a way of observing that the subject of the poem, even down to the mower's feet and body in motion, have their precise counterparts in the "prosody" or rhythmical effects of the writing. And yet there is more. For what does the mower do as he labors over the field? He moves back and forth, in lines, laying 'the swale in rows," all within a demarcated space. Just so, the writer moves back and forth, laying words down in lines, within the space of the page. And what is it that Frost's speaker finds important, in the work of both: he says, "The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows." It is the facts of words--not only the "pale orchises" themselves, the actual flowers in short, but the shape of those letters on the page, the words that signify the flowers.

We can thus read "Mowing" as a poem about both mowing, and writing; indeed why separate the two? For Frost the manual and the intellectual labor are bonded in these ways. There is, for him, no alienation between the worker/writer, and his field/subject. The modern industrial worker, hanging bumpers on fifty Ford coupes an hour, may feel alienated from the products of his labor. Frost's modernist poetry sets itself the task of healing that split. That is the cultural work he set himself to do.

As you read these poems, keep these goals in mind. It may also be useful to bear in mind the concerns of a writer like Henry Adams. Confronting the incredible speeds of the dynamo, and its imperceptible energies, Adams was disturbed at a modern world that was growing beyond human scale, becoming super-sensual, and a process of random or chance events. Frost's response to these conditions is to bring his world down to scale (a field of grass), to have direct sensual contact with it (the scythe in his hands, or a "bright green snake" he scares), and to imagine one's work within that world as a sequence of careful, orderly, and connected steps. If Adams confronted the "nightmare" of the modern, symbolized by its machinery, Frost countered that vision with the ordinary "dream" of "fact."

Reading Assignment

1. Robert Frost, selected poems (pp. 1117-1133).

Writing Assignment

1. Discuss the attitudes to work that Frost represents in "The Tuft of Flowers" and "Mending Wall"; in particular, how are they different?
2. Read "Mending Wall" and answer:
1. What are the different reasons that "gaps" are made in the stone fence?
2. What is it "that doesn't love a wall"?
3. What are the key differences between the speaker, and his neighbor? Why are they significant in the poem?
3. "The Death of the Hired Man" and "Home Burial" are both types of dramatic poems: that is, they have speakers, in dialogue with each other, in a continuous dramatic scene. Yet they also have elements of narrative: characters, setting, plot. As dramatic and narrative poems, how do such poems achieve moments of thematic crisis, and resolve them, such as we expect to see in a short story? Select either poem for a discussion of about 200-300 words.
4. Supposing we were to read "After Apple-Picking" as a poem about repetitive labor, and thus as a criticism of certain kinds of work for profit. (Factory labor is repetitive in this sense, as well.) If we did so, then what does this poem seem to say about the effects of such labor, both on the body, and on the mind, of the laborer?
5. In "The Road Not Taken," has the speaker's selection of a pathway really "made all the difference"? Why? In what sense?
6. In "Birches" as well as in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Frost presents us with a speaker who has a tendency to digress (in thoughts about boys swinging on trees) even to get lost in thought (staring into a snowy woods). Compare and contrast the two poems on that basis: Why is his digressive tendency comical in one poem, dangerous in another? Discuss.

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