Frost sought further education in Harvard's classics department and, in 1898, joined his mother as a teacher at her private school. When symptoms of consumption necessitated a move to the country, he situated his family on a poultry farm in Derry, New Hampshire, purchased by his grandfather. Frost did little during a six-month depression that resulted from his son Elliott's death from cholera and his mother's hospitalization with cancer. At the farm he kept hens, a cow, and a horse, and established a garden and orchard; ultimately, the farm rejuvenated him. But Frost never profited from his labor and suffered annually from hay fever.
From 1900 to 1905, while scrimping along on a $500 annuity from his grandfather's will, Frost produced bucolic verse that enlarged on his experiences with Yankee gentry. Simultaneously, he worked at cobbling shoes, farming, and editing the Lawrence Sentinel. A failure at farming, for the next six years he supported his family by teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy before moving to Plymouth, New Hampshire, to teach education and psychology at the State Normal School.
To achieve his original goal of writing serious poetry, Frost, at his wife's suggestion, gambled on a break with the past. In 1912, he sold the farm and used the money to move to England. During a three-year self-imposed exile in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire, he scraped for cash. He came under the influence of poet Rupert Brooke and published A Boy's Will (1913), followed by the solidly successful North of Boston (1914), which contains "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," and "After Apple-Picking."
