Growing Up with Robert Frost

There was never a sound beside the wood but one

and that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? …

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours, or easy gold …

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

                        (“Mowing”)

As I age, my mind reviews one by one people, events and places from the past. I surprise myself by a preoccupation with the American poet who lived from 1874 to 1963, Robert Frost. I had not thought of him for years.

Now, sixty years on, I realise how much he was part of my impressionable adolescence. He was read and quoted in our house and studied at school. Considered the National Poet, he epitomised the rural life to which I was romantically attached—and defined a place, New England. This was my home too, its stone walls, night skies, birch trees, woods and snow.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” illustrates Frost’s characteristic style—a strict adherence to metre and rhythm. The poem flows, the mind is lulled by its pace and repetition to the point where the reader can predict the next line almost before he reads it. It’s the only poem I can recite by heart because of its dedication to sound. It gives me the old pleasure of rote learning. Nothing could interfere with its completion.

Even Frost’s long narrative dialogue poems are concerned with the natural sound of speech:

                “Silas is back …

Be kind,” she said.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him?

But I’ll not have the fellow back,” he said.

“I told him so last haying, didn’t I? …

What good is he? Who else will harbor him

At his age for the little he can do?” …

 

“Warren, he has come home to die.” …

 

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there

They have to take you in.”

                                           “I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

                        (“The Death of the Hired Man”)

 

He excelled at reproducing colloquial, ordinary language. Having lived in New Hampshire most of his life, he knew his neighbours. As the critic Randall Jarrell said, Frost had a knowledge of his human subjects that few poets had.

Initially popular, he was later criticised for being too traditional, even folksy. Critics argued he was out of touch with modern poetry. Some stated he was at a crossroads between traditional nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, modern only in his use of ordinary people and language for subject matter. He said that free verse is like playing tennis without a net. And yet his narrative poems, unlike his shorter poetry, come close to free verse.

Frost was not only a nature poet. Some of his best work looks into questions of existence. He shows starkly the loneliness of the individual in an indifferent universe:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

                        (“Desert Places”)

 This poem expresses for me my own vulnerable state in illness.

Facing old age with the weariness and cynicism of a lifetime, he writes:

No memory of having starred

Atones for later disregard,

Or keeps the end from being hard.

 

Better to go down dignified

With boughten friendship at your side

Than none at all. Provide, provide!

                        (“Provide, Provide!”)

 

Frost’s poem “Mowing” reveals the value and satisfaction of labour, for itself, for what it achieves and for the thought and desire man puts into it. “After Apple Picking” shows the other side of labour when too much of a harvest becomes obsessive, a dream gone sour.

Frost knew grief and loss. His parents died when he was young. His wife predeceased him by twenty-five years. He lost three daughters, and one son took his own life. A sister and a daughter suffered from mental illness. He worked for years in a harsh climate, often for little reward, in a place he loved but which also wore him down.

Frost is said to have had many sides: whimsical, humorous, cranky, satirical, contradictory, reverent, eccentric, egotistical. His chosen epitaph states: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry, said of him: “No other poet has put the best of the Yankee Spirit into his writing so completely.” How does one define the Yankee Spirit? It originates from the early Puritans whose independence, integrity, community awareness, shrewdness, frugality and practicality were characteristic. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self Reliance” is considered a literary expression of the Yankee Spirit.

After a few years living and writing in the UK, Frost returned to the USA at the beginning of the First World War and bought a New Hampshire farm. He earned an income from writing, teaching and lecturing. At Amherst College he taught English and established creative writing at the Bread Loaf School, Middlebury College. The school remains today as one of his legacies.

People remember him as a poet but, he stated, student teaching and lecturing “have given me my living”. A performance artist, he used voice, gesture, facial expression, silence, stance to deliver his talks, often straying from the subject or omitting it altogether. Although he seemed informal, shorten­ing his words to ’tis, gotta, ’em, he took his speeches very seriously. And he used his poems as examples. Metaphor, intimation, innuendo, double entendre are at the heart of them. He defined education as “hanging round till you catch on”, and “the refinement of sentiment”. He received over forty honorary degrees, including ones from Oxford and Cambridge, but never finished a degree himself.

I remember watching Robert Frost read a poem in honour of John F. Kennedy at his inauguration in 1961. He was eighty-six years old then, his shock of white hair blowing in the wind, losing his place in the rattling pages. My father remarked he was too old to do this. His voice quavered but I remembered his younger voice—monotone, sometimes a drawl, understated, quirky, like the people he wrote about. He finally stopped reading, helpless in the elements of age and weather, and recited his only poem he knew by heart, “The Gift Outright”:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by …

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright …

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

         Such as she was, such as she would become.

In describing the gradual settlement of North America, Frost appealed to American patriotism as he had appealed to regionalism in his New England nature poems. It took time to belong to a new land, and the land fashioned its pioneers.

Looking back on Frost, now that I am less impressionable, I have ambiguous reactions. Some of the old romance has gone. He seems old-fashioned now, and lacking complexity. Perhaps he is more of a story teller? Why did he mean so much to me?

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep

Perhaps it is because he can be read on two different planes. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” can be absorbed for itself and the scene it creates; and metaphorically—that drawn by the obligations of a lifetime, we can only pause briefly to appreciate beauty.

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by.

                        (“The Road Not Taken”)

celebrates the individual, the reward for those who don’t conform. For many people these lines describe life-changing decisions. Leaving my country for a new one on the far side of the world almost fifty years ago, I chose the less-worn path. Frost puts into words what is deep inside us.

I am attached to Robert Frost also because of his old values, his simplicity and style of writing, his Yankee resilience and perseverance, all expressed humbly and, in a way, artlessly. He had a voice like no other. He gave readers a sense of belonging, not only to rural New England and all the states, but to childhood, and to work. He talked philosophy. He touched on hope, despair, mystery and humour. At a time when the nation was building urban and interstate highways, looking to an industrial future, he was a keeper of the past.

I wonder if many people of my generation who also grew up with him pause to remember his lines and feel the old satisfaction of them. Or even those not of my generation who didn’t grow up with Robert Frost.

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them …

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

                        (“Birches”)

Frost said there was always a kernel sentence in his poems. In “Birches” it is “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.” He didn’t know he was going to say that, he said, “But I came on that meaning out of much living … the triumph of it is that it just comes to a few words out of the many days and many, many, many pleasures and pains.”