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A Boys Will and North of Boston by Robert Frost

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A Boys Will and North of Boston by Robert Frost That’s part of it, certainly, but we forget that the speaker is Warren balking at the “lethal promise” of a sunset recalls A Boy’s Will repairing a wall as he speaks, that the necessity of walls Frost, in “Storm Fear,” pondering whether the storm pelting his is a belief he shares with his one-dimensional neighbor who windows in the dead of the night is too great an adversary and North of Boston can only repeat the aphorism, “Good fences make good to combat: “And my own heart owns a doubt // whether ’tis by Robert Frost neighbors.” The poem, finally, is about needing and repairing in us to arise with day // And save ourselves unaided.” and walls and about not loving them. It is in that contradiction John Hollander has fought that storm, too. In the “Ground of that the poem lives. Winter,” he shudders at the “the language of the howling After Frost: An Anthology of Similarly, we all remember the last lines of “The Road wind” and the “land of the unfair cold space, of the unblinking Poetry from New England Not Taken”—“I took the one less traveled by, // And that has time.” The whispering scythe that spoke to Frost in A Boy’s edited by Henry Lyman made all the difference”—but we forget what comes before Will has also carried its message to several generations of that. As Jay Parini points out in his superb 1999 biography of New England poets who came in his wake. In nature or in StoryLines New England Frost, the last lines refer to what the poet thinks he will one civilization, “Fact” is still the “sweetest dream” a poet can Discussion Guide day say, “with a sigh.” He is imagining how he will eventually know, whether it is Wallace Stevens hearing the “nothing that No. 2 misinterpret what happened. In fact, as Parini notes, “there is not there and the nothing that is,” or Alan Dugan noting may well be no road less traveled by.” Frost tells us earlier in that the “sea grinds things up.” “A wave slaps down, flat,” by Bill Ott the poem that both roads look more or less the same: “Though Dugan says. Like a fact. StoryLines New England as for that the passing there // Had worn them really about the Literature Consultant; same.” What the poem is actually about, in other words, is the Discussion questions Editor and Publisher, way we misread our own past as we get older. Parini explains: 1. Compare the rural folk in Frost’s dramatic poems to those of Booklist “the speaker of the poem gestures toward a simple, even some New England fiction writers. Might the couple in “Home simplistic reading, while the poet himself demands a more Burial” evolve into Dick and May Pierce from John Casey’s complex, ironic reading.” Frost’s desire to be understood Spartina? Or, could the characters in “The Hired Man” fit wrong can’t be reduced to mere misanthropy. comfortably into an Annie Proulx story? Cite other examples. Frost’s public persona, as Jarrell reflects, is “the Skeleton on the Doorstep that is the joy of his enemies and the 2. What do you think Frost meant when he said that he wanted despair of his friends. Just as a star will have, sometimes, his poems to be understood wrong? its dark companion, so Frost has a pigheaded one, a shadowy self that grows longer and darker as the sun gets lower.” 3. Show examples of how Frost brought conversational But if Frost the celebrity alienated other writers and critics, language into his poems while still preserving rhythm, meter, his poems have influenced multiple generations of American and stanza. poets—and, especially, New England poets. The anthology After Frost groups the poems of 30 poets, from Wallace Further reading Stevens through Martin Espada, around four themes echoed Randall Jarrell. No Other Book: Selected Essays. in Frost’s work. Reading these poems juxtaposed against one HarperCollins, 1999. another, and against thematically linked selections from Jeffrey Meyers. Robert Frost. Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Frost, drives home the point that contemporary poets in New Jay Parini. Robert Frost. Henry Holt, 1999. England can’t escape the Frost tradition. William H.Pritchard. Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. The connection is most apparent in poems about nature. Oxford, 1984. When Robert Penn Warren watches a sunset and sees “Acid and arsenical light // Streaked like urine,” he is following in the footsteps of Frost, who found in the natural StoryLines America has been made possible by a major grant from the StoryLines world not a sense of unity but an alien presence, sometimes National Endowment for the Humanities, expanding our understanding of the world, and is administered by the American Library Association beautiful but bearing no intrinsic connection to humanity, Public Programs Office. storylines.ala.org deserving of respect but also of fear. America A Radio/Library Partnership Exploring Our Regional Literature ©2004 American Library Association only a publisher, but also a circle of poets to review his work. The sparring husband and wife in “Home Burial” have Fellow American Ezra Pound—who, by 1912 when Frost much more in common with the frustrated Vermonters in arrived in London, was already well ensconced as a poet and Annie Proulx’s Heart Songs than they do with the farmers in a A Boy’s Will and North of Boston expatriate promoter of the avant-garde—offered a slightly Norman Rockwell painting. The remarkable critic and intrepid by Robert Frost condescending but positive and influential early review of Frost supporter Randall Jarrell devotes an entire essay to “Home and A Boy’s Will, and other English poets and literary figures— Burial,” and in his word-by-word analysis, he demonstrates Ford Madox Ford, Edward Thomas, and Edward Garnett, how the couple in the poem, estranged from one another in After Frost: An Anthology of among them—chimed in, both in praise of that book and, later, the wake of their son’s death, strike out, using both silence Poetry from New England of North of Boston. Frost, the New England bard born in and words. Displaying an uncanny understanding for the edited by Henry Lyman San Francisco and launched in London, was on his way. psychological dynamics between husband and wife—the It was the monologues and dialogues in North of Boston agonizing, tentative attempts to reach out, and the violent power “Robert Frost—the quintessential New Englander—was born that clearly established Frost as a fresh and distinctly American struggle to which such attempts, inevitably misunderstood, in San Francisco, midway between the Gold Rush and the voice in 20th-century poetry, but the shorter lyrics in must lead—Frost takes the reader through a sparring match Earthquake.” To many Americans, those words, quoted from A Boy’s Will, while relying to a degree on the somewhat stilted that, while far more subtle, is every bit as vicious as the Jeffrey Meyers’ 1996 biography of the poet, come as quite a poetic language of an earlier time (phrases like “thou didst” duel between George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s shock. How could Frost be a Californian, of all things? In fact, appear frequently), still announce a poet determined to Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Frost lived in San Francisco until he was 11, when his father speak directly, using what Frost called the “sound of sense.” When the tortured wife finally allows herself to verbalize died and his mother returned with her children to her home in By this he meant the rhythm of the conversational sentence the source of her confused anger at her husband, who could Lawrence, Massachusetts. That Frost, at least technically, was employed in a structure that used the poetic conventions of “sit there with the stains on your shoes // Of the fresh earth an immigrant to New England is only the first in a series of meter, rhyme, and stanza. from your own baby’s grave // and talk about your everyday revelations one encounters when reading the man’s work and The poem “Mowing,” from A Boy’s Will, displays what concerns,” it is almost unbearable to read the uncomprehending learning of his life. would become key elements in Frost’s verse. Drawing its husband’s response, a complete retreat into bitter irony Frost was born less than a decade after the Civil War, subject from the everyday work of rural folk, the poem and self-justification: “I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever during Ulysses S. Grant’s second term as president, and lived describes a laborer cutting hay with a scythe. The poem begins, laughed. // I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.” until 1963, two years after he read a poem at JFK’s inauguration. “There was never a sound beside the wood but one, // And Yes, as today’s pop psychologists would say, the husband During the majority of those nearly 90 years, he was America’s that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.” suffers from a case of “It’s all about me.” But Frost goes way most recognized and beloved poet, but the grandfatherly Immediately, we feel the isolation of the speaker (a recurrent beyond that, putting the reader inside the skin of both image we have of him—“the other bookend to match Norman Frost theme), but we also hear the speech patterns of everyday combatants. He makes us feel, on one level, the injustice that Rockwell,” in the words of Peter Davison—is as inaccurate as life and recognize the intimate connection between the laborer prompts the husband’s outburst, but also shows us, the assumption that he was born on a farm in New Hampshire.
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