Reflections On Robert Frost S Essay, Research Paper
North of Boston, published in England in May of 1914, was Robert Frost s second book, following A Boy s Will, which had been published the year before. In 1915 it was published in America, preceding A Boy s Will here. The book is markedly different from A Boy s Will, in that it is less introspective and more in an objective mode. In the first book Frost gives us a speaker who, in most cases, is ruminative and reflective. North of Boston gives us more dialogue and the poems are more like stories; Frost has drawn for us quaint pictures of New England life and uses these seemingly simple settings to render intimations of meaning that are truly vast in range. As Lawrence Thompson says in his book, Robert Frost, he portrays a variety of rural New England responses to the human predicament, not for purposes of recording local color but rather to evoke universal extensions of meaning (9). In this book Frost provides opposing viewpoints to explore a variety of subjects through the interaction of people.
North of Boston intersperses lyric poems with lyric moments in non-lyric poems. The book is written almost entirely in blank verse, framed by the monologues Mending Wall in the beginning and The Wood-Pile as the last poem. Good Hours was added in italics at the end.
Frost, himself, downplayed the importance of any sense of meaning in these poems: Meaning is a great consideration. But a story must never seem to be told primarily for meaning. Anything, an inspired irrelevance even to make it sound as if told the way it is chiefly because it happened that way (Pritchard 93). Frost was able to recreate the natural, homely sound of the speech of rural New England people; he was trying to be a poet for the masses, but in a new and distinctive way. Later, he would refine this idea into his sound of sense theory of poetics, which he was already beginning to write about in letters to friends in 1913-1914. Later, he would also pack quite of bit of political meaning into his poems, as he voiced his opposition to New Deal politics. Frost never minded contradictions when they suited his purposes and the first poem in North of Boston stands as testament to the fact.
Mending Wall, as Louis Untermeyer notes in Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken, rests upon a contradiction. Its two famous lines oppose each other (110). Something there is that doesn t love a wall, the poem opens. Good fences make good neighbors, it says later. In each of these places in the poem the reader finds himself nodding at the truths stated. If man resents the limitations and boundaries he finds in life, he nevertheless needs structure and guidelines. The speaker s position is set against the wall, and he gets the last word:
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, Good fences make good neighbors.
It is noteworthy that the speaker likes his line, Something there is that doesn t love a wall, well enough that he says it twice, also.
The Death of the Hired Man intersperses narrative and dialogue. It pits Mary s concern against Warren s need to keep his relationship with Silas impersonal, businesslike. The mild argument they are having is rendered moot when Silas is discovered dead. The poem seems to address the futility of man s situation and the hopelessness of his plans. Along with Home Burial, The Housekeeper, and A servant to Servants, The Death of the Hired Man contrasts the concerns of men and women, placing the focus of the woman s interest in the domestic realm and that of the man s outside the home, or with more of a view of the world beyond the home; Frost s men are mostly practical, while his women are more emotional. In The Death of the Hired Man, Mary has the privilege of defining home: Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in. Warren s view of home is more based upon convention as he queries: Why doesn t he go there? His brother s rich, /A somebody director in the bank.
The Mountain also offers contrasting ways of looking at things. The technique Frost uses is interesting. A stranger s questions furnish ideas about the mountain which the local person he s talking to doesn t normally consider. The native considers the mountain as a hindrance, both to growth for the town and to travel. He would not think of climbing it to see its strange brook . . . he would consider it a waste of effort to climb it for the great view at the top; and to climb it for the sake of climbing would seem downright silly (Untermeyer 114)
A Hundred Collars is about two men about as different as men can be. The newspaper collector is open and talkative. He enjoys people, as his description of his job shows. The teacher is fearful and uncomfortable in a situation not familiar to him.
The exploration of the differing perspectives between the sexes is continued in Home Burial as it is the woman who names the home incomplete with her dead child. She can t forgive her husband for his uttered aphorism upon completion of the child s burial; Three foggy mornings and one rainy day /Will rot the best birch fence a man can build. His concerns for the outside world are further exemplified when he admonishes her to pull herself together as someone is coming down the road. The woman can t understand his practicality in the face of tragedy any more than he can fathom her reality of emotion. We are made acutely aware of his uneasiness in dealing with her breakdown and of her awareness of his discomfort when she accuses, You can t because you don t know how to speak, and, You oh, you think the talk is all. (We can also hear in these lines a possible argument by the poet about the sound of sense.) He seeks reconciliation; she seeks affirmation. She continues her leaving amidst his protestations and we realize that there is more than one Home Burial going on here.
The heart of The Black Cottage is not in its tale of the woman who had lived in the house; her story is merely the subject that gets the minister talking and reflecting. In the core of his ruminations is the idea that truth is not a fixed matter. Truth changes with time and circumstance:
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
It s all in how (and when) one looks at truth.
Blueberries is told entirely in dialogue and doesn t really contain any profound and contrasting statements. It is simply a story about two neighbors of the Lorens who are jealous of that family s blueberry-picking prowess. The poem doesn t attempt to be didactic in any substantial way. In speaking about The Death of the Hired Man, Frost once said, . . . I began to suspect myself of liking their gossip for its own sake (Pritchard 93). He could just as well have made the same remark about Blueberries.
A Servant to Servants is a narrative by monologue posing as dialogue. The speaker, a woman, carries on as though conversing, but the only responses the reader gets are filtered through the mouth of the woman. The format is ambiguous, which serves to add to the reader s distrust in the woman s reliability. Our disbelief in the speaker seems to be well founded as the poem continues and we re informed that she and her family have a history of mental illness, for which she has received treatment. The theme of man s practicality versus the domestic, emotionally oriented concerns of woman continues. Her husband, Len, is shown to have diverse outside interests: Len undertakes too much. The woman has, a houseful of men to feed, and needs rest from, from doing /Things over and over that just won t stay done.
The largest sense of contrast one perceives in After Apple Picking is that the orchard and the task of picking is described so beautifully, in spite of the fact that the picker doesn t really appreciate the beauty of the orchard. The arch of the man s foot hurts and he is exhausted too drained to care very much about the great harvest I myself desired. He complains about the loss of fallen fruit to cider. Yet this poem, in the elegiac beauty of its blank verse, has, as Louis Untermeyer articulates, the enchantment of a lingering dream (Untermeyer 244).
The two points of view in The Code are that of employer and employee. It is a comical poem, in spite of its near tragedy. Its humor lies in the worker s message that, a good hired man will let you tell him what to do and when to do it.
But, if you are wise, you won t tell him how to do it! (Untermeyer 44)
In The Housekeeper we see a departure from the vantage men hold to in the previous poems; the housekeeper s mother, our informant, has a woman responsible for this:
I never saw a man let family troubles
Make so much difference in his man s affairs,
He s just dropped everything. He s like a child.
I blame his being brought up by his mother.
Yet this departure is more a matter of degree than a complete reversal of the man s role; as the housekeeper s mother says:
To see where all the money goes so fast
You know how men will be ridiculous.
The man has, in failing to marry the live-in housekeeper, lost her services and her companionship; his proposal comes too late, as she has married someone else. There is a strong implication that his deviation from a man s traditional role has ruined him as a man. Although his gentleness with the animals is praised, it is also ridiculed by the mother of the housekeeper, even though she ridicules men s tendencies in general.
The Fear, the story of a married woman living with a man who is not her husband is high drama. It isn t like any of the other poems in North of Boston. Frost builds tension as the woman thinks her husband is stalking her. At the climax of the story a man out for walk with his young son turns out to be the source of the sounds which have frightened her. The first time I read it I thought that the woman was attacked at the poem s end. After reading it several times, I came to the conclusion that the poem was merely a recounting of a tryst. Although the dialogue is as good as one expects from Frost, I found the narrative voice a little too lacking. The reader has to work too hard and, as a result, this poem will make few readers list of favorites.
In The Self-Seeker, a man has been crippled by an accident and is to receive a settlement for his injury. A friend tries to get him to hold out for more money, but he won t listen; he wants the matter ended. The friend s statements and the lawyer s actions make it clear that the maimed man is settling for far less than he can get. The matter of the man s possible financial gain is weighed against his psychological need to put the event behind him and get on with his life, different though that may be now that he is disabled.
The Wood-Pile would fit nicely into A Boy s Will. It is reminiscent of The Tuft of Flowers in that there is a connection with a man who is not present, though the result of his labor is. As the wood-pile begins to decay, we see a contrast between the efforts of man and those of nature to undo man s accomplishments. This theme is also present in The Black Cottage, where nature is reclaiming the abandoned house.
Good Hours was placed outside the rest of the poems in North of Boston, as an epilogue. There is no dialogue here. It is a first-person account of a man who goes for a late-evening winter walk. He notices the people in their homes on the walk out and the darkened houses of now-sleeping people upon his return. He notices the sound of his footsteps as he walks through the silent town toward home.
More than any of Frost s other books, North of Boston is a book of people (Thompson 9). With the exception of Good Hours, After Apple-Picking, and The Generations of Men (which I found so uninteresting as to omit in my analysis), the poems all use dialogue as a device to show more than one interpretation of an issue. Using contrast or ambiguity tends to compel the reader to question associations often thought of as fixed and well defined. Frost makes copious use of contradiction in all his books, but no other book offers so much dialogue to make available to the reader multiplicities of significance. True to his word, however, Frost never, in this book, allows a poem s message to become more important than is the natural, conversational sound of his verse.
Works Cited
Thompson, Lawrence. Robert Frost. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1959.
Pritchard, William. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1984.
Untermeyer, Louis. Introduction and Commentary: The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost s Poems. New York, Henry Hold and Company, 1971.
Lathem, Edward. The Poetry of Robert Frost. New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1975.