two roads diverged and all that jazz

Selected Poems by Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) had a persona as a New England farmer-poet and a wise old man, but this was a deliberate construction; in reality, he was born in San Francisco, where he lived until he was 11 when he moved to industrial Massachusetts. He married sometime between 1892 and 1900, and during this time he bounced around a variety of careers (miller, teacher, student) before moving to a farm in New Hampshire purchased for him by his grandfather (who supported him financially by an annuity throughout his life). A part-time farmer, he taught from 1906-1912, eventually selling the farm in 1911. At this point he moved to England with his family and took up writing full-time. His focus and subject matter was already New England, but his first two books were published in London long before they appeared in America. Frost returned to America in 1915 and was hugely popular with the academy, at which point he started a career of lecturing and poet-in-residencing, winning the Pulitzer in 1924, 1931, 1937, and 1943. Many other honours followed — even a mountain! — and he presented himself as a stoic poet-patriarch. Biographers have since leveled that this covered a vain and cruel man whose ambitions caused much suffering. Frost also, it is said, battled depression and guilt over his sister’s mental illness, the deaths of his wife and daughter, and his son’s suicide.

Unlike his literary persona, Frost never suffered rural poverty (thanks, of course, to his grandfather), but he spent his career documenting his witnessing of it. He describes the rural culture as “a diminished thing,” but also recognized that isolation could be a positive thing, and as such he was ambivalent about advances like phones. Frost eschewed free verse, unlike his fellow modernists, and celebrated traditional rhymes and metres. He also enjoyed writing in the narrative form. Frost did, however, share the modernist respect for simple, unornate diction. The key achievement of his poetry was to combine colloquial speech with traditional verse. Frost was in may ways the intellectual heir to Emerson and Thoreau and assumed it was possible for one lone individual to question and work out a relationship to God and his existence in nature. However, his writing was not as romantic as Emerson’s nor as challenging to social norms as Thoreau’s. To Frost, the poet’s role is to provide a wisdom that might serve to stay confusion for a time.

In “Mending Wall,” the narrator, in a truly Thoreau-like manner, questions the need for walls — he notes that nature tries to break down the wall every spring. But he can’t shake the provincialism of his colleague in wall-mending, and the narrator questions the neighbour about the wall but never progresses. The neighbour is like a wall himself unwilling to be cracked by the narrator’s springlike new ideas. Formally I think the poem reflects its subject matter — the ideas don’t conform to the line breaks as in some of Frost’s poetry (like A Line-Storm Song), and the sentences seem to end more organically and less hemmed-in.

“The Fear” is particularly interesting because it is basically entirely in dialogue, which helps the suspense build through the narrative line of the poem. That we don’t have the help of a narrator to unravel the ending unsettles us, especially given the everyday nature of the scenario. The woman approaches the mysterious figure because of her fear, and so fear both drives her to confront what she dreads, but it also leads to her demise (if, at the end, what we witness is really a demise). Interesting.

Frost touches on the idea of the destructive nature of modernity in “The Oven-Bird.” He alludes to summer passing into fall, which he equates with “the” fall (as in the expulsion from the Garden of Eden). The suggestion is that this is the end of New England as Frost has known it. He refers to the “highway dust” that lies over what used to be green and lush is the summer that has just passed. The traditional ways of life have become “a diminished thing,” and the birds have given up singing as a result.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a classic, of course. The narrator uses the snowy woods as a metaphor for his own death. Though he think about the silence and peace of the end, he is tied to earth by the “promises” he has made and must keep and b the jingling of his horse. I have always loved the image of it not yet being time to sleep — there are things yet to be done, and they must be accomplished before we can seek that peace that seems so promising in our darkest moments.

Finally, in “Provide, Provide,” we have a poem that illustrates Frost’s disgust with celebrity (including his own, I wonder?) and shows how once beauty and youth are lost in an empty vessel, nothing remains. For those so empty, it becomes better to die young than to risk suffering the humiliation. Anything remaining, for such people, whether it be friends or companions or anything — it’s all been purchased. “Provide, Provide” becomes a caution against a material existence that seems to threatened mass society now. I also wonder if it doesn’t touch on much of Frost’s regrets regarding his own family and his own life in the spotlight.