Poetry Robert Frost Poems and Notes 1

MONIVAE COLLEGE
UNIT 1 VCE ENGLISH
TERM 2, 2015

OUTCOME 3
On completion of this unit the student should be able to identify and discuss, either in writing and/or orally, how language can be used to persuade readers and/or viewers.

Workbook and Notes on Selected Poetry of Robert Frost

CONTENTS PAGE
Context and Focus 3
Assessment 3
Poems 3 - 11
Focus Questions – A Summary 12
Essays/ Commentary on Frost 13 - 20

Context and Focus:
The focus of this semester has been the examination of Issues of Identity and Belonging, and how it is presented in texts, such as film, short stories, poetry, and the media. The question of identity is central to our lives. It is important that a recognised part of every person’s understanding of Icdentity and Belonging is the question – What do I mean? This has been the essential question that has framed your study.

Assessment: This will be done in the week commencing June 08.

You will need to respond to the following topic:

How is written language used to attempt to persuade the audience to share the points of view in the Frost’s poetry?

These selected poems all have reflections on the nature of Identity and Belonging.
MENDING WALL
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
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."
Much of the meaning that we make as we read occurs entirely unconsciously, whether it is great literary works of fiction or non-fiction that we are reading, journalism, informative or instructional material.

Through textual analysis, we are reflecting on how language works in a way which makes our reading process much more conscious – we are looking at how language is being used, and with what effect. It is particularly easy to do this sort of analysis with poetry since it is so highly crafted and structured, with every word being purposefully chosen. Furthermore it is particularly helpful (and inspiring) for our own writing, to see how it is that others write.

Here are some guiding questions which are helpful in thinking about textual and language analysis, and particularly about poetry.

Think of these questions in relation to ‘Mending Wall’

Q1: What happens in this poem?

This question asks you to identify the setting, the characters and the action of the poem. You are looking for the concrete details that are given to you in the narrative line. In this case, for example, you might answer by pointing out that the action of the poem is the countryside ‘border’ between two neighbouring properties. On one property the fence borders an apple orchard, on the other a pine forest. The neighbouring owners meet on a particular day to mend the stone wall which divides their land. The gaps in the wall have been caused perhaps by shifting ground, perhaps by careless hunters – they appear, and one of the jobs of the farmer is to check and repair. The wall is built by carefully balancing stone on stone, with each farmer working from their own side of the fence: ‘We keep the wall between us as we go/To each the boulders that have fallen to each.’
As the stones are gradually piled one on another, the speaker, the owner of the apple orchard questions the purpose of a wall which keeps nothing out or in, and his neighbour responds with an age old saying: ‘Good fences make good neighbours’. But this familiar response goads the speaker, who then goes on to give his view that walls can create unnecessary barriers. The poem ends with the repetition of the idea that ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.

Q2: What is your initial theory of what the poem is about, the ideas behind the work?

In responding to this question you will find yourself exploring the view that the writer seems to have about the wall – its necessity or otherwise. We are offered opposing views in the poem which opens with the idea that ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’ but finishes with the line ‘Good fences make good neighbours’. In order to help you work out the poet’s attitude to these differing views, think about the following questions.

• How do these neighbours represent different ways of seeing the world?
• How might the fence be symbolic in the poem?
• How does the poem raise ideas about land as territory or property. Compare the attitude that good fences make good neighbours with the view that we cannot own the land but must simply stand as guardians.
• Do you think Frost is saying something about human presence on the landscape?
• Do you think that the craft of building a stone fence is being valued in the poem?
• Do you think these are good neighbours?

Q3: What strikes you about how the poem has been written?

It would be artificial to entirely separate the content of the poem (ideas you have raised in your responses to the questions above) from the form or style in which it is written – because you’ll find a close relationship between the two. This is why you need to think about the ideas of the poem before you can really closely analyse the language. Here are some ways of thinking about the style of ‘Mending Wall’.

Narrative structure

This poem falls into the category of narrative poetry – that is, it tells of the event of repairing a stone wall in a farming landscape. However it is different from some narrative poetry in that the story is not told for its own sake (as in a ballad or an epic), rather, Frost uses the medium of the story to explore ideas about the way we live. You’ll find in this and many of Frost’s other poems that the narrative detail is interspersed with reflective thought, and ultimately with lines toward the end of the poem which allow us to ‘universalise’ the ideas, so that they apply not just to this moment, but raise questions for each of us about how we are to live.

Narrative voice
There are two characters in this poem, both of whom speak, but only one of whom is a first person speaker.

• Notice that the poem uses both indirect speech: ‘My apple trees will never get across/and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him’ and direct speech: ‘ “Good fences make good neighbours...” ’; ‘ “Why do they make good neighbours? … ” ’
• Notice how it is that the speaker conveys the words of the neighbour – ‘He only says…he says again…’
• Much of the poem is about what the two neighbours do together – look at how regularly the words ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’ are used in the central parts of the poem. What do you think Frost is aiming to achieve by this use of first person plural? Notice too how this sense of partnership is ironically subverted by the fact that what the neighbours are doing together (mending a wall) neatly separates them.
• Is the poem written in such a way that we are invited to sympathise with the speaker? With the neighbour?
• Which words give us a sense of the character of the speaker?
• Which words give us a sense of the character of the neighbour?
• The poem is narrated in the present tense – do you see any link between this narration and the ideas Frost is exploring?

Tone

• Think about how you would describe the tone of this poem. Is it light-hearted?
Thoughtful? Philosophical? Conversational? Didactic? In choosing the words you would use to describe the tone, work out what your evidence is, and most significantly, how the tone leads us to think about the speaker, and the ideas in the poem.
• Does the tone shift? If yes, what might this shift signify?

Structure

While the tone is conveyed in part by the speaking voice of the poem, it is also conveyed by the structure of the poem.
• Do you think of the poem as having a formal or an informal structure? How would you justify your view? How does this poem ‘look’ in relation to other poems you know?
• What difference does it make that there are no stanzas; that sentence length varies; that while most lines consist of 10 syllables, there is not a strict adherence to the metre of iambic pentameter?
• What difference does it make that some lines are repeated?
• Read the poem aloud, and listen to the sound of the language in your ear, and the ‘natural’ pace of the lines as you speak. How do the pace, the rhythm and the patterning, the metre reinforce the ideas of the poem. Examine lines 2 and 3, for example, where the hyphenated words ‘frozen-ground-swell’ slow down the pace of our reading as we labour over them, but then they are followed by the rush of ‘and spills the upper boulders in the sun’.
• Talk with others about which words you might emphasise as you read, why you might read that way.
Imagery (including metaphor, symbol, figurative language)
The general term ‘imagery’ refers to the way in which the writer gets ideas across – both through the images created (often visual) and the associations and ideas suggested by figurative or symbolic language (such as metaphor or simile or symbol).

Think first of the aspects of visual picture you have as you read this poem.
• Which are the images that stand out most for you?
• How do they build on each other to create an effect? For example, the image of the two neighbours as they ‘walk the line’, is further developed as they ‘keep the wall between’ them, and as they delicately balance the stones.
• Look for the contrasting images: for example, the ‘frozen-ground-swell’ and the ‘spilling boulders in the sun’; the ‘hiding’ rabbit and the ‘yelping dogs’; the apple orchard and the pine plantation; the darkness and shadows compared with the image of spring; the stone age determination of one neighbour and the mischievous goading of the other. Are there others? How do they affect your interpretation?
• Tease out the symbolism of a ‘fence’, of apples versus pine, of the ‘old stone savage’ in contrast to the mischief maker.
• Look at the use of metaphor – the boulders ‘spill’; they are ‘loaves’ and ‘balls’; spring makes mischief.

Puzzles

Even after thinking the poem through in this detail, there are bound to be puzzles that remain. It is worth identifying them.

• When Frost writes ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’ what do you think that ‘something’ refers to? The speaker tries to answer the question: ‘I could say Elves to him,/But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather/ He said it for himself.’
• Talk together about what you think it is that the speaker wants ‘him’ to voice.
• Another puzzle – why do you think the title ‘Mending Wall’ leaves out the preposition ‘the’?

Q4: What effect does the poem have on you?

Your answer to the questions above will help you think about your own attitude to this poem, the way you are reading it.

• What makes good neighbourliness in your view and do you think your view of neighbourliness is consistent with the view that the poem suggests?
• Thinking beyond the content of the poem, what are the sorts of reasons that human beings build fences across landscapes, and how might thinking about the validity or otherwise of these reasons help us think about the world in which we live and the way in which we want to live in it?

Q5: What is your considered theory of what the poem is about?

By now you should feel confident about how you are reading the poem, what you think it says to you. (How remarkable it is that 45 short lines, beautifully crafted, can get us thinking so broadly.)
USE THE QUESTIONS ABOVE POSED ABOUT MENDING WALL TO DIRECT YOUR UNDERSTANDING AND ANALYSIS OF THE REMAING POEMS.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

THE LOCKLESS DOOR

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again.
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a 'Come in'
To whatever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

THE KITCHEN CHIMNEY

Builder, in building the little house,
In every way you may please yourself;
But please please me in the kitchen chimney:
Don't build me a chimney upon a shelf.

However far you must go for bricks,
Whatever they cost a-piece or a pound,
But me enough for a full-length chimney,
And build the chimney clear from the ground.

It's not that I'm greatly afraid of fire,
But I never heard of a house that throve
(And I know of one that didn't thrive)
Where the chimney started above the stove.

And I dread the ominous stain of tar
That there always is on the papered walls,
And the smell of fire drowned in rain
That there always is when the chimney's false.

A shelf's for a clock or vase or picture,
But I don't see why it should have to bear
A chimney that only would serve to remind me
Of castles I used to build in air.
A TIME TO TALK
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
A PATCH OF OLD SNOW
There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten --
If I ever read it.
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
DEVOTION
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to ocean -
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.
FIRE AND ICE
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING
Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf,
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day
Nothing gold can stay.
WHAT FIFTY SAID...
When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
I went to school to age to learn the past.

Now when I am old my teachers are the young.
What can't be molded must be cracked and sprung.
I strain at lessons fit to start a suture.
I got to school to youth to learn the future.
SOME GENERAL FOCUS QUESTIONS – A SUMMARY
Subject matter – What is the poem about?
Invited reading – What is the poet’s message to you and their purpose for writing the poem? What reflections are made with respect to the theme of The Human Condition?
What readings of Identity and Belonging are offered in these poems?
How are readings of Identity and Belonging constructed?
Who/what is included? Who/what is excluded?
Do any of these poems accept or reject our commonly held beliefs about Identity and Belonging?
How is that achieved and for what purpose?
Are there new or emerging views of Identity and Belonging in these poems?

Moods, Emotions and Experiences – What is the predominating mood of the poem?
Does the mood change?
What are the feelings expressed by the poet?
How does the poem make you feel?
Is the poet successful in positioning you to adopt the invited reading?
Technique – How has the poet achieved the aim of the poem?
Is the language appropriate and or vivd?
What emotions are built up around words?
What devices or techniques can you recognise and are these effective?
Is there a rhyme and or rhythm?
How does the poem sound when it is read aloud?
Form – How is the poem structured?
Does it match a particular convention?

ROBERT FROST – A biography
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree.
Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.
By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost's early work as "the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost's career as The American Bard: "He became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain."
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, "He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding."
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.
(Retrieved from : http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192)

THE POET FARMER –
AN ESSAY ON FROST’S WORK, USING EXAMPLES FROM HIS POEMS
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.
- Two Tramps in Mud Time
Between writing poems and farming, which was Robert Frost’s avocation and which his vocation, is difficult to say. A choice he himself was wary of making.
Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of, say, a thousand
(From, say, a publisher in New York City).
- New Hampshire

For Frost, poetry and life were one and the same thing. He once said, ‘…If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything. Young poets forget that poetry must include the mind as well as the emotions. Too many poets delude themselves by thinking the mind is dangerous and must be left out. Well, the mind is dangerous and must be left in.’
The mind and the heart, reason and illusion, dream and reality, practical sense and escape – the conflict that arose from these and the ‘choice’ he made, seeking a fine balance – forms the crux of most of Frost’s poems. Each poem is the result of a thought process either motivated by a practical task or by the keen love for nature and farming tasks. Sometimes Frost lets reason prevail and sometimes flows with dream and imagination. A good example is Birches in which when ‘truth broke in with all her matter-of-fact…’ he is provoked to ask: ‘Now am I free to be poetical?’
While farming allowed him the proximity with nature, which in turn provided the inspiration to write, poetry itself made him feel, contemplate, imagine and dream perhaps just a little too much than would have been desirable for a farmer whose work demanded practicality and objectivity.
As he went about his farming tasks, his poetic sensibilities would surface and he would question the cold detachment of man from nature. Often while engaged in the upkeep of his farms, he would be compelled to wish that men were less practical and methodical about their job of taming nature to their advantage and perhaps a little more imaginative sometimes. This conflict of dream and reality; of fact and dream; lie at the very core of his poems.
His poems have to be appreciated in the light of his unique relationship with the soil - not that of an onlooker, or of a nature worshipper but of a farmer who worked with the very things he wrote about. It would not be wrong to feel that it was primarily aesthetic joy that he desired to reap from his farms.
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
- The Pasture
In his introduction to the Collected Poems (1949), RF wrote: ‘Our problem then is as abstractionists, to have the wilderness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected associates and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down.’
He had a position of advantage as a poet-farmer, here. The themes are universal. The farmer picked them from around him and then the poet composed verse ‘to lodge a few poems where they would be hard to get rid of, like pebbles.’
As a poet he valued the gifts of nature, appreciated the sights, desired aesthetics and natural drift of things – sometimes even to the point of impracticality. So we see a farmer, drifting into sleep and dreams:
…I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
- After Apple-Picking
A cluster of flowers, spared by another farmer, makes him wish:
That none should mow the grass there
While so confused with flowers.
-A Tuft of Flowers
He defends and prays for harvest being left ‘unharvested’! Produce being ‘forgotten and left’!
May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.
-Unharvested
Then again we find the farmer asserting the value of practicality and labor. Sometimes, just as he begins to anticipate fantasy, the truth breaks in:
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
- Mowing
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
-Birches
As a farmer, he stands with the world and his fellow men to understand them and then as a poet he withdraws into himself to attain higher forms of understanding. He delights in both.
How love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
-Putting in The Seed
The boundary wall mending ritual is observed between neighbors but RF cannot but question:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
- Mending Wall
He questions cold detachment when asked if he would sell his Christmas trees:
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare.
-Christmas Trees
The Characters

Robert Frost writes of the farmers, neighbors, their life and work, their loneliness and the manner in which they deal with the situations of their life.
Living in secluded farms how guarded they are and yet how they extend help and favor to others.
I always felt strange when we came home
To the dark house after so long and absence.
- The Fear
The fear of tramps, a couple talking:
I didn’t like the way he went away
That smile! It never came of being gay
Still he smiled – did you see him? – I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread.
—
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not.
- The Smile (The Hill Wife)
A curious farmer, fascinated by the night sky:
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
-The Star Splitter
How farm chores are carried out, not without principle:
Moving a flock of hens from place to place.
We’re not allowed to take them upside down,
All we can hold together by the legs,
Two at a time’s the rule, one on each arm,
No matter how far and how many times
We have to go.
- The Housekeeper
More than anything, Robert Frost’s aim was to capture ‘the speaking tone of voice in his poetry.’ The ‘tones’ of voice of the Yankees was important for him – the way they clipped their sentences. Brilliant examples of this are The Code, Blueberries, A Time to Talk, Snow, Home Burial, The Census Taker, A Servant to Servants and almost all the rest. But more about this later.
Life on Farms
Son of a journalist father and teacher mother, Robert Frost was introduced to the great literary texts early in life. When he was 16, his first poem, La Noche Triste was published in The Lawrence High School Bulletin. At 20, My Butterfly: An Elegy in appeared on the first page of The Independent, the New York periodical.
So it isn’t as if Robert Frost didn’t write poems before, but the ‘Derry years’ are said to be very productive for him as a poet. A gift from his grandfather, the Derry farm was home to the Frost family for ten years (1900 – 1911). Frost raised chickens and taught at the Pinkerton Academy. It was here that he was inspired to write among other poems - Mending Wall, Hyla Brook, and The Pasture. Robert Frost enjoyed simple farm chores and the freedom it gave him to be close to nature and men and to compose poems at his pace.
A lump in the throat
In 1911 when the Frosts moved to England, it was as he said, ‘to organize his poetry’. Sure enough, his first collection of poetry A Boy’s Will was published in England in 1913 followed by North of Boston in 1914.
In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost wrote, ‘A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.’
Frost said about Mending Wall, ‘I wrote this poem, Mending Wall, thinking of the old wall that I hadn’t mended in several years and which must be in a terrible condition. I wrote that poem in England when I was very homesick for my old wall in New England…Another which I wrote when I was a little homesick: Birches.’
…lighted city streets we, too, have known,
But now are giving up for country darkness.’
-In The Home Stretch
Frost: The ‘essential voice and spirit’ of New England
Frost’s family belonged to New England for generations before him. Nicholas Frost settled there in early 1600 and his son Samuel Abbot Frost was Robert Frost’s great grandfather who farmed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. His grandfather, William Prescott Frost also farmed at Lawrence, Mass.. But the poet’s father, William Prescott Frost Jr., moved to San Francisco to become a journalist. It was in 1885 that the family returned to Lawrence, Mass. to live with grandparents when the poet’s father died of consumption.
Robert Frost, when he first came to New England did not like the Yankees. As he grew to know them, he developed a fondness for them and their characteristic traits. It was his years of farming at New Hampshire that were most important for his poetic genius.
Most of his poems are set against the New England countryside with its people, their lives, their hardships and their beliefs forming his themes.
John F Kennedy, himself a New Englander, said of Frost: ‘His life and his art summed up the essential qualities of the New England he loved so much: the fresh delight in nature, the plainness of speech, the canny wisdom, and the deep underlying insight into the human soul.’
Ezra Pound in a review of North of Boston, wrote: ‘He (Frost) is quite consciously putting New England rural life into verse….There are only two passions in art; there are only love and hate with endless modifications. Frost has been honestly fond of the New England people,…He has given their life honestly and seriously. He has never turned aside to make fun of it. He has taken their tragedy as tragedy, their stubbornness as stubbornness. I know more of farm life than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of life.’
When Robert Frost decided to go to England in 1912, he wrote to Susan Hayes Ward: ‘My dream would be to get the thing started in London and then do the rest of it from a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get yankier and yankier.’
From England he wrote to her: ‘We can’t hope to be happy long out of New England. I never knew how much of a Yankee I was till I had been out of New Hampshire a few months. I suppose the life in such towns as Plymouth and Derry and South Bercwick is the best on Earth.’
(Retrieved from : www.bestoffrost.com)
ANOTHER COMMENT
Frost's poetry is structured within traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes; he disliked free verse. Although he concentrates on ordinary subject matter, Frost's emotional range is wide and deep, and his poems often shift dramatically from a tone of humorous banter to the passionate expression of tragic experience. Frost regarded nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration but nonetheless fraught with peril. His work shows his strong sympathy for the values of early American society.
(Retrieved from www.aspirennies.com)
Frost's Style
Of all his poetic elements, Frost's style seems the hardest to pin down. Actually one cannot pin it down, but something could be said to further our un-enlightenment. Let's begin with what Frost said about style in a letter to his friend Louis Untermeyer dated March 10, 1924
Dear Old Louis:
Since last I saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. Some fair to good writers have no style and so leave us ignorant of how they take themselves. But that is the one important thing to know: because on it depends our likes and dislikes. A novelist seems to be the only kind of writer who can make a name without a style: which is only one more reason for not bothering with the novel. I am not satisfied to let it go with the aphorism that the style is the man. The man's ideas would be some element then of his style. So would his deeds. But I would narrow the definition. His deeds are his deeds; his ideas are his ideas. His style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds. Mind you if he is down-spirited it will be all he can do to have the ideas without the carriage. The style is out of his superfluity. It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward. Emerson had one of the noblest least egotistical of styles. By comparison with it Thoreau's was conceited, Whitman's bumptious. Carlyle's way of taking himself simply infuriates me. Longfellow took himself with the gentlest twinkle.
Now that Frost explained it, do we understand his style? Well...no! Here's another excerpt from Frost's lecture before the Winter Institute of Literature at the University of Miami, in 1935. The talk was entitled "Before the Beginning and After the End of a Poem":
Frost said, "In the creative act, a certain impulse or state of mind precedes the writing of the poem. Next comes what Stevenson called 'a visitation of style', a power to find words which will somehow convey the impulse." Certainly an essential element of Frost's style is his choice of words or diction. He uses everyday words you would use in conversation. Frost writes his sentences with meter and rhythm to enhance their beauty. He also uses many poetic devices adding to the craftsmanship of the poem.
In 1931, Isidor Schneider called Frost's style "gnomic." William Rose Benet said, "Frost is no transcendentalist." Cleanth Brooks wrote Frost's character or poetic mask may be described as "the sensitive New Englander, possessed of a natural wisdom; dry and laconic when serious; genial and whimsical when not; a character who is uneasy with hyperbole and prefers to use understatement to risking possible overstatement." Possibly, Brooks explains best in Frost's own criteria: "style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds."
Let's try to identify another poet's style. T. S. Eliot can certainly be termed a disillusioned urban aristocrat. Emily Dickinson, a introspective soul, a house hermit, perhaps a bit mad, and terribly connected to an inner world. Does this fit? "Style is the way he carries himself toward his ideas and deeds." Ernest Hemingway's style was that of the adventurer, soldier of fortune.
We know what "style" means in terms of one's dress. Style embellishes one's persona and signals the observer what to expect - what is in character. A poet's style can be like that too. Frost said, "It is the mind skating circles round itself as it moves forward." You have to think of that carefully - the mind making figure eights, spins and displays, showing off prowess.
Frost is the rural Yankee who writes about everyday experiences - his own experiences, but he was one who saw metaphorical extensions in the everyday things he encountered. The experiences are his subject matter along with the rural setting of New England nature, seasons, weather and times of day. This raw material accounts for one of the enduring qualities of his poems because these things are timeless - they are still in our consciousness - still a part of our lives. Regardless of subject and setting, Frost's metaphorical extensions and his mastery of form are his true genius.
Frost believed that the subjects of poetry should be "common in experience," that it should speak of familiar things everyone recognizes, BUT "uncommon in expression."
"All the fun's in how you say a thing."
Poetry should not try to tell us something we don't know, to reform us, or even teach us. To Frost, the poem should cover familiar ground, but say it in an unfamiliar way. If the poet succeeds, "the poem will keep its freshness like a metal keeps its fragrance."

Letter from Robert Frost (edited) to Louis Untermeyer, dated March 10, 1924 from SELECTED LETTERS OF ROBERT FROST edited by Lawrance Thompson., Henry Holt and Co., 1964. Used by permission of the Trustee of the Estate of Robert Frost and Henry Holt and Co. (Retrieved from : http://www.frostfriends.org/style.html)