“The Pasture,” published in 1913, displays Frost’s first-person amiability as well as his delight in a homeowner’s country chores. In familiar farm surroundings, he speaks from the farmer’s point of view in an easy iambic pentameter. His diction, containing seven contractions in eight lines, is the simple wording of an ordinary, earth-centered fellow. The pattern of masculine end-sounds, rhyming abbc deec, is characteristic of Frost, who ties the relaxed, confident quatrains together with a disarmingly uncomplicated repetition and rhyme.
In identical meter but without rhyme, “Mending Wall,” written in 1914 after Frost’s visit to the Scottish highlands, ventures beyond mundane observation to muse over the effects of stone boundaries on relationships. In neighborly fashion, the speaker joins a next-door landowner (identified as Frost’s French-Canadian neighbor, Napoleon Guy) at an appointed time to “walk the line,” a seasonal chore that calls for repairing the damage to the land by rabbit hunters and winter heaving—the alternate freezing and thawing above the frost line. The reference to the inevitability of destruction alludes to Matthew 24:2 (“There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down”), Christ’s prophecy that Herod’s temple in Jerusalem will eventually fall.
In an offhand parable, the speaker mischievously challenges a prevailing attitude toward neat divisions, expressed in the homespun revelation that “Good fences make good neighbors.” To the speaker’s way of thinking, an orchard poses no hazard to a pine woodlot, but the neighbor persists in the tradition of replenishing fallen stones. The forceful action suggests that tradition is an adversary not easily overthrown.
“Home Burial,” written in 1914, presents an engrossing, intensely empathetic scenario. The title suggests both a home graveyard and a household buried in unrequited grief. In the action, a perplexed husband asks his wife to “let me into your grief,” perhaps a reference to Elinor Frost’s devastation at the death of son Elliott. In the poem’s fictional setting, the husband responds to his mournful wife’s inability to cope with the death of their child by putting up a false cover of business as usual. Departing the confines of blank verse through extensive enjambment, the carry-over lines and double caesuras [“-how could you?-”] press the poem’s two main characters into a halting, real-life confrontation. Added to this personal drama is the couple’s view through the upstairs window of a fresh burial plot that stands out among older gravestones. The husband, who resents his wife’s refusal to share her suffering with him, defuses a confrontation by sitting at the top of the stairs while his wife frowns her disapproval.
To buoy his 116-line poem, Frost elaborates on the husband’s and wife’s motivations for their behavior. At the heart of the domestic confrontation is the indelicate word “rot,” which the husband, carelessly utters after digging an infant-sized grave. The wife, named “Amy” (from the Latin word for love), uses her emotions about her child’s death as a weapon against her husband—and, ironically, against herself. Given to stiff-necked silence and withdrawal, she threatens to abandon him in order to escape their separate emotional difficulties in dealing with death. The pacing refuses to drop to a mutually satisfying resolution as the husband, whose muscular hand dug the hole and mounded the gravel, resorts to force if need be to keep his marriage from disintegration and public shame. The realism of harsh words hanging in the air suggests a situation that Frost had witnessed or been party to—perhaps his own troubled marriage to a tight-lipped woman or an anticipation of the marital difficulties of his daughters.
“The Death of the Hired Man,” also written in 1914, pits wife and husband in a confrontation over infirmity and self-esteem. As Mary and Warren tiptoe around a touchy subject—old Silas’ return to the farm on the pretense of performing short-term labor—they debate indirectly the same question of values that fuels “Home Burial.” Mary, who shelters tender feelings, wants Warren to lower his voice to spare Silas the insult of Warren’s disdain for him. As for the question of having Silas ditch the meadow, an unnecessary task, Mary assures Warren that the ruse is a “humble way to save [Silas’] self-respect.”
The couple’s low-key debate featuring the dynamics of feminine mode versus masculine mode resurrects the confrontation between actively doing and passively existing. Like the husband in “Home Burial,” Warren is a doer. His physicality clashes on prickly occasions when he can’t see the logic in merely being a friend to Silas. The opposite of Warren is Mary, who recognizes that Silas feels outclassed by Harold Wilson, the self-important collegian, whose academic accomplishments outrank Silas’ skill in bunching hay into “big birds’ nests.” At the crux of the confrontation, Mary speaks Frost’s most beloved aphorism: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.”
The homely, almost stumbling cadence conceals the altruism of Mary’s gift of grace. Lest the reader doubt Frost’s poetic thrust, he ends with three linked images—”the moon, the little silver cloud, and she”—a metaphorical preface to Warren’s squeeze on the hand and somber announcement that Silas has died.
Another of Frost’s contemplative literary moments illumines “The Road Not Taken,” a teasing conundrum written in 1916, when the poet was trying to succeed at farming and publishing. This somewhat stoic poem, characterizing a momentous, life-altering resolution, profits from the poet’s blend of delight and wisdom. The speaker recalls once choosing one of two forks in a road through the woods. Settling for the less-worn fork, the traveler notes, with some regret, that normal momentum would cause him to press ahead, thus negating a return trip to try the other path.
The poem stops shy of dramatizing the speaker’s choice of which road to take. Frost deliberately hedges on the speaker’s emotion by whittling down differences in the two roads with “just as fair,” “perhaps,” and “about the same.” Anticipating nostalgia over missed chances, the speaker acknowledges that the morning’s decision “has made all the difference” but leaves the reader with no tangible clue to an interpretation, good or bad.
In “Birches,” a fanciful monologue, the poem’s speaker expresses a Twain-like nostalgia for carefree boyhood and tree-climbing. The 59-line poem triggers a memory—bent trees jog the poet’s recall of a boy’s mischievous but normal pastime. Indulging in digression, the speaker notes that ice storms have the same effect on birches and that the glass-like shards falling on the ground below suggest the shattering of heaven’s crystal dome, a symbol of divine perfection. Restored to the original train of thought after “Truth broke in / With all her matter of fact,” the speaker returns to reliving boyhood in the country, where a skilled birch-bender could subdue trees with the same care as a hand requires to fill a cup to the brim without spilling.
The philosophical gist of “Birches” begins in line 41, where the speaker identifies himself as a rural lad given to birch-bending. Now burdened with frustration characterized as a walk in a “pathless wood,” a cobweb tickling the face, and a tearing eye that has met the lash of a limb, the speaker remains in the land of metaphor by envisioning an escape. To avoid an adulthood “weary of considerations,” he pictures a respite—a swing outward from reality. Accentuating his point is the italicized word “Toward,” which reminds the reader that the speaker isn’t ready for heaven. Earth is his true home. Even with everyday miseries, being earthbound in “the right place for love” suits human nature.
In 1923, at the height of his appeal, Frost composed “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” one of America’s most memorized poetic treasures. He wrote it about an early period of personal frustration and considered it his “best bid for remembrance.” The rhyme scheme—aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd, like that in “The Pasture”—couples a flow of action and thought over four stanzas, ending in a gently repetitive refrain. Restful and placid, the action of watching woods being covered with snow is elusively simple. This simplicity is reinforced by the graceful yoking of tactile, auditory, and visual imagery with euphonious, drowsy -eep sounds in sweep, deep, keep, and sleep, and alliterated l sounds in lovely, sleep, and miles.
Dramatically, the poem builds to a climax and then makes its way down to resolution. At its heart, line 8 implies a tension: Is this the “darkest evening of the year” because it is December 22, the winter solstice, or because of some emotional turmoil in the viewer’s spirit? Is the poem a veiled death wish? Whatever the reader’s interpretation, the speaker reassures that a stock-still moment of contemplation of the “dark and deep” is normal and uplifting, for the figure decides to continue toward a preset goal or destination.
Note that the title contains the pun “evening,” which means both post-sunset hours and a balancing or leveling. December 22, the shortest day of the year, is a traditional folk holiday that celebrates the equalizing of day and night. Beginning on December 23, winter begins its annual decline and days get longer as the seasons shift toward spring. After the speaker’s pause, the morbid lure of snow-decked woods returns to an emotional balance as melancholy gives place to jangling harness bells and mental demands of “miles to go,” which could refer to physical miles or unfinished tasks or responsibilities to family or job. The end of the ambiguous couplet, “before I sleep,” could preface a night’s rest or an eternal sleep—death—that concludes a satisfyingly challenged life.
“Departmental: The End of My Ant Jerry” is a verse animal fable. Composed by Frost when he was 62 years old, the poem takes its title from Rudyard Kipling’s “Departmental Ditties” and demonstrates a blend of tweakish humor and mock-heroic form. The comic eulogy lauds the “selfless forager” in intentionally inept rhyme and a truncated rhythm that limps along in mockery of staid Homeric epic style. The elevation of Jerry, a victim of bureaucratic bumblers, visualizes him lying in state—embalmed in ichor and enshrouded in a petal—in the state’s ennobling gesture to his role as citizen. Rigidly formal in style and protocol, the poem establishes the city’s soullessness as the twiddly funeral director completes the ceremony in a semblance of decorum.
