Early Poems: A Boy's Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval

Summary

This volume joins Robert Frost's first three books of poems, all written about New England farm country and published between 1913 and 1916. A Boy's Will (London, 1913) is a book of short lyrics arranged in three parts, and the library text keeps the original contents page, where each title is followed by an italic gloss in the third person describing what the youth of the book is feeling: in Into My Own he imagines stealing away into dark trees and believes those who follow will find him only more sure of all he thought was true; in Storm Fear he is afraid of his own isolation; in The Tuft of Flowers a mower finds a patch of butterfly weed spared by the man who scythed the field before him and decides that men work together whether they work together or apart; and in Mowing a scythe whispers in the hay while the speaker concludes that fact is the sweetest dream labor knows. Other poems include Ghost House, My November Guest, A Prayer in Spring, Revelation, The Trial by Existence and Reluctance. North of Boston (London, 1914), dedicated to E. M. F. as this book of people, opens with the brief invitation The Pasture and then turns to longer blank-verse narratives and dialogues in the speech of rural New Englanders. In Mending Wall two neighbors rebuild a boundary wall each spring while the speaker questions the neighbor's proverb that good fences make good neighbors. In The Death of the Hired Man, Mary and Warren argue over whether to take back the old laborer Silas, who has come home to die; Warren finds him dead at the end. Home Burial shows a husband and wife divided by grief for their dead child. A Servant to Servants is the monologue of an overworked farm wife who has once been in the State Asylum and whose uncle was kept caged at home. After Apple-picking ends a harvest in drowsy half-dream, and The Wood-pile finds an abandoned cord of wood rotting in a frozen swamp. Mountain Interval (New York, 1916) opens with The Road Not Taken, printed in italics as a prologue, and includes Birches, in which a boy swings birches down to the ground and the aging speaker wishes he could do it again, The Oven Bird, An Old Man's Winter Night, A Time to Talk, The Hill Wife sequence, and Out, Out, in which a farm boy loses his hand to a buzz-saw and dies under ether. Frost wrote most of these poems while farming at Derry, New Hampshire, and published the first two books with David Nutt in London during his family's stay in England from 1912 to 1915; Henry Holt brought out American editions and published Mountain Interval.

Plot or Argument

• A Boy's Will, Part I

  Lyrics of a young man withdrawing into nature and love: Into My Own, Ghost House, My November Guest, Storm Fear, A Prayer in Spring, Rose Pogonias, In a Vale, The Vantage Point, Mowing and Going for Water. The glosses tell a loose story of youth testing solitude.

• A Boy's Will, Parts II and III

  Part II states convictions about the soul, love, fellowship, death, art and science (Revelation, The Trial by Existence, The Tuft of Flowers, Pan with Us, The Demiurge's Laugh). Part III returns to autumn and endings, closing with Reluctance, which asks whether it is a treason to go with the drift of things.

• North of Boston: Mending Wall and The Death of the Hired Man

  The book of people opens with The Pasture and Mending Wall, in which the speaker teases a neighbor who repeats his father's saying about fences. In The Death of the Hired Man, Mary pleads with Warren to welcome back the old hired man Silas, who wants to prove himself useful one last time; their talk turns on the meaning of home, and Warren returns from the barn to say that Silas is dead.

• North of Boston: Grief, labor and fear

  Home Burial dramatizes a quarrel on a staircase over a child's grave; The Black Cottage recalls a widow's faith in the Union cause; A Servant to Servants gives the voice of a farm wife near breakdown; After Apple-picking, The Code, The Fear, The Self-seeker and The Wood-pile observe work, pride and loneliness; Good Hours ends the book with a winter walk.

• Mountain Interval: The Road Not Taken and Birches

  The italic prologue describes a traveler choosing between two equally worn roads and foreseeing that he will later tell the choice with a sigh. Birches imagines a farm boy subduing his father's trees and ends with the speaker's wish to climb toward heaven and be set down again on earth, the right place for love.

• Mountain Interval: Other poems

  Christmas Trees, An Old Man's Winter Night, In the Home Stretch, The Oven Bird, Putting in the Seed, A Time to Talk, The Hill Wife, The Bonfire, Out, Out, Brown's Descent, The Gum-Gatherer, Snow and The Sound of Trees extend the New England landscape to aging, marriage, accident and wartime unease.

Characters

• The speaker of A Boy's Will, lyric persona

  A youth whose moods the contents glosses describe, drawn to solitude, love and the work of mowing.

• The neighbor in Mending Wall, dramatic figure

  A farmer who carries stones like an old-stone savage and will not go behind his father's saying.

• Mary and Warren, married couple in The Death of the Hired Man

  A farm couple who disagree over whether to take back the old hired man; Mary pleads for kindness.

• Silas, the hired man

  An aging laborer who returns in autumn, hoping to ditch the meadow and teach young Harold Wilson to build a load of hay, and dies in the night.

• Amy and her husband, couple in Home Burial

  Parents who grieve their firstborn child in opposite ways and cannot reach each other.

• The farm wife of A Servant to Servants, monologue speaker

  A woman worn out with cooking for hired men, who speaks of her time in the State Asylum and her husband Len's cheerfulness.

• The boy in Out, Out, victim of an accident

  A farm boy doing a man's work at the buzz-saw, whose hand is cut and who dies under the doctor's ether.

Lessons

• Work as a way of knowing

  In Mowing, The Tuft of Flowers and After Apple-picking, ordinary farm labor becomes a way to think about truth, fellowship and death. Frost refuses fairy gold and easy dreams in Mowing and insists that the fact itself is sweet. Students can watch how close attention to a task opens onto large questions.

  • In Mowing, what does the scythe whisper, and why does the speaker reject the idea of fairy gold?
  • How does the tuft of flowers left by the earlier mower change the speaker's feeling of loneliness?
  • What does the apple-picker fear about his coming sleep?

• Neighbors and boundaries

  Mending Wall shows two men working side by side to rebuild what nature keeps knocking down. The speaker doubts the need for the wall but still meets his neighbor every spring to mend it, and the neighbor's proverb gets the last word. The poem leaves the reader to weigh custom against curiosity rather than deciding for us.

  • Who actually suggests mending the wall each spring?
  • Why does the speaker say his apple trees will never eat his neighbor's pine cones?
  • Is there wisdom in Good fences make good neighbours, or only habit?

• What home means

  In The Death of the Hired Man, Warren defines home as the place that has to take you in, while Mary calls it something you somehow haven't to deserve. Silas comes back not to his brother's house but to the farm where he worked, hoping to be useful. The poem asks what we owe to those who have no claim on us but need.

  • Why is Warren reluctant to take Silas back?
  • How do Warren's and Mary's definitions of home differ?
  • Why does Silas not go to his rich brother?

• Choices remembered

  The Road Not Taken describes two roads worn really about the same, yet foresees that the traveler will one day claim that his choice made all the difference. The poem is often read as a call to nonconformity, but its details suggest a gentler irony about how people tell the stories of their lives.

  • What does the speaker say about how worn the two roads were?
  • Why will he tell the story with a sigh?
  • Is the poem praising the choice or describing how we remember choices?

Context

Frost came of age as a poet when American verse was divided between genteel magazine lyrics and the new experiments of the Imagists. He chose traditional meters, especially blank verse, but filled them with the sound of New England speech, an aim he described as catching the sound of sense. His rural subjects come from the declining hill farms of New Hampshire and Vermont, where many families had left for the cities and the West.

Composition

Most of A Boy's Will and much of North of Boston were written during Frost's years at the Derry farm (1900-1911) and as a teacher at Pinkerton Academy and Plymouth. In England he lived at Beaconsfield and then at Little Iddens near Dymock in Gloucestershire, where he became close to Edward Thomas. David Nutt of London published A Boy's Will in 1913 and North of Boston in 1914; Henry Holt issued American editions in 1915 and published Mountain Interval in 1916. The Road Not Taken first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1915. The stored Mountain Interval text reproduces a later Holt printing whose copyright page names 1916 and 1921; the italic glosses of A Boy's Will were dropped from Frost's later collected editions.

Reception

Ezra Pound reviewed A Boy's Will in Chicago's Poetry magazine in 1913, and North of Boston was praised in England and America, making Frost known before his return in 1915. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize four times (1924, 1931, 1937, 1943) and read at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. Mending Wall, The Death of the Hired Man, Birches and The Road Not Taken are among the most widely taught American poems.

Comparisons

• the-road-not-taken

  The library's separate record for the poem that opens Mountain Interval; this collection shows it in its original place as an italic prologue to a book of rural lives.

• walden

  Thoreau's account of living by Walden Pond shares Frost's New England ground and his attention to labor, solitude and the meaning of the woods, though Thoreau argues in prose where Frost dramatizes.

• tintern-abbey

  Wordsworth's blank-verse meditation on a revisited landscape lies behind Frost's conversational blank verse in Birches and North of Boston, but Frost keeps a farmer's skepticism toward nature's consolations.

• poems-of-emily-dickinson

  Two New England poets of nature and death: Dickinson's compressed hymn-meter lyrics against Frost's spoken blank verse and narrative dialogues.

• whitman-complete-poems

  Whitman's open, expansive free verse is the American alternative Frost rejected when he said writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down; the comparison shows two ways of voicing ordinary American life.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The italic glosses beside each title in the A Boy's Will contents, which tell the youth's story in the third person.
• Who speaks the line Good fences make good neighbours in Mending Wall, and how often.
• The way Mary and Warren in The Death of the Hired Man talk past and toward each other on the porch steps.
• The detail in The Road Not Taken that the two roads were worn really about the same.
• The turn in Birches from a boy's play to an older man's weariness and his wish to come back to earth.

Key terms and names

Blank verse

Unrhymed iambic pentameter; Frost uses it for the talking poems of North of Boston and for Birches.

Dramatic monologue

A poem spoken by one character to a silent listener, as the farm wife speaks in A Servant to Servants.

Hired man

A farm laborer paid by the season, like Silas, who comes and goes with the haying.

Interval

In New England speech, low land along a river; Frost's dedication to Mountain Interval names the farms where he lived.

Oven bird

A North American warbler whose loud midsummer call Frost hears as a question about what to make of a diminished thing.

Gloss

A brief explanatory note; the original contents of A Boy's Will gives one for each poem.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In Mending Wall, what natural force keeps breaking down the wall, and what do the two men do about it?
2. Comprehension Why has Silas come back to Warren and Mary's farm, and what does he say he wants to do?
3. Comprehension In The Tuft of Flowers, why did the earlier mower leave the flowers standing?
4. Interpretation Is the speaker of Mending Wall wiser than his neighbor, or does the poem leave that open?
5. Interpretation The Road Not Taken says the roads were about the same. Why, then, will the traveler say that his choice made all the difference?
6. Interpretation In Birches, why does the speaker want to climb toward heaven but be set down again?
7. Big Question What do we owe a person who has no legal claim on us but comes to us in need, as Silas does?
8. Big Question Is hard work good for the soul in itself, as Mowing suggests, or only when it is shared?

Faith Connections

• Luke 15:11-32 (Scripture)

  The father's welcome of the returning son resembles Mary's view in The Death of the Hired Man that home is something you need not deserve; Warren's reluctance echoes the elder brother.

• Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (Scripture)

  Two are better than one, for they have a good reward for their labor: the Preacher's praise of companionship in work parallels the lesson of The Tuft of Flowers.

• Deuteronomy 19:14 (Scripture)

  The command not to remove a neighbor's landmark gives ancient weight to the neighbor's respect for boundaries in Mending Wall.

• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Great Conversation)

  Lewis describes friendship as people standing side by side absorbed in a common interest, which is the bond the speaker discovers with the unseen mower.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Ordinary rural life, closely observed and given in its own speech, contains the great human questions; therefore the poet need not invent fairy gold but only attend to the fact, whether of mowing, a wall, a dying hired man or a choice of roads.

Rhetorical device: Refrain with shifting meaning. In Mending Wall, the neighbor's proverb appears twice, once in mid-poem and again in the final line, where its repetition becomes the neighbor's whole answer.

Debate: Resolved: that the speaker of Mending Wall is right that the wall is unnecessary.

Memory Work

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

'Men work together,' I told him from the heart, 'Whether they work together or apart.'

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose two poems from North of Boston and explain how Frost lets characters reveal themselves through the way they talk.

Comparison with Walden: Compare Thoreau's bean-field in Walden with Frost's Mowing and The Tuft of Flowers: what does each find in solitary farm work?

Medical Lens

Frost's rural poems contain some of the clearest pictures of medicine and mental illness on early twentieth-century New England farms. A Servant to Servants is a monologue by a farm wife who has been in the State Asylum, whose doctor (named Lowe) says she needs rest rather than medicine, and who describes an uncle who went mad young and was kept in a cage of hickory poles at home; she compares the old practice of keeping the insane at home or in the poorhouse with the state hospital, which she now thinks the better asylum. The poem is a period document of the move from domestic confinement to state institutions and of the rest cure for exhausted women; any modern diagnosis of her condition is a reading, not a fact. Out, Out describes a buzz-saw amputation, the doctor's ether anesthesia and death, apparently from shock, in a few lines; the poem's title echoes Macbeth. Home Burial portrays divergent grief after a child's death, a wife who cannot bear her husband's apparent calm and a husband who cannot understand her. The Death of the Hired Man shows an old laborer returning to die, and An Old Man's Winter Night pictures solitary old age.

• North of Boston, A Servant to Servants

  The farm wife describes her exhaustion, her doctor's prescription of rest, her stay in the State Asylum, and her family's earlier practice of keeping a mad uncle caged in the house.

  Asylum Institution Neurosis Anxiety Madness Psychosis Physicians Doctors
• Mountain Interval, "Out, Out--"

  A boy's hand is cut by the buzz-saw; he begs that the doctor not amputate, is put under ether, and his pulse fades while watchers listen at his heart.

  Surgery Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• North of Boston, Home Burial

  A mother's grief for her firstborn turns against her husband, who dug the grave himself; the poem stages two incompatible ways of mourning.

  Grief
• North of Boston, The Death of the Hired Man

  Mary notices how changed and worn the old hired man Silas is; Warren later finds him dead.

  Death Dying Aging Senescence

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a short blank-verse dialogue in the manner of North of Boston, in which two people disagree about a chore and reveal more than they mean to.

• Essay

  Compare the definitions of home offered by Warren and Mary in The Death of the Hired Man and say which the poem seems to favor.

• Classroom

  Read Mending Wall aloud in two voices, the speaker and the neighbor, and chart where the speaker teases and where he is serious.

• Fiction

  Retell The Road Not Taken from the point of view of the traveler many years later, telling the story with a sigh.

Further Reading

• Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini

  Full biography covering the Derry years and the English sojourn.

• The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, David Orr

  Book-length study of the poem's ambiguities and reception.

• Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, Richard Poirier

  Influential study of Frost's poetics.

• Collected Poems of Edward Thomas, Edward Thomas

  Poems by Frost's English friend, written with his encouragement in 1914-1917.