15

BUILDING SOIL
1931–1934

All experience ever is is confirmation anyway.

—FROST TO THEODORE MORRISON, JUNE 27, 1930

“I am just starting to write letters again, letters or anything else, after a long sickness of public life,” Frost had explained to Untermeyer in the summer of 1930. “I hardly know my own handwriting. I hardly know myself seated at a desk.” Continuing in this meditative vein, he wondered what had become of the years between 1912, when he left for England, and the present. It had all seemed “no very real dream.” While awaiting the publication of his Collected Poems, he’d said, “I wonder what next. I don’t want to raise sheep; I don’t want to keep cows; I don’t want to be called a farmer.” He groused that an acquaintance had recently asked him if he’d written anything in the past two months. “Me! Write anything in two months! It used to take me ten years to write anything.” He guessed it would take him twice as long now.1

Frost had spent so much time before the public in the past decade, reading and lecturing, that he seemed to have lost track of the inner self that formed poems. It would, as he predicted, be a slow haul to his next slim volume, which would not appear until 1936. In the meantime, Frost would see, if anything, a widening of his role as public poet. The demands for his presence on platforms around the country seemed only to grow as word of his remarkable performing abilities spread. “If you got wind of a Frost reading, you changed whatever plans you had and went to see him,” Richard Eberhart recalled. “I saw him in the late twenties, and again in the early thirties. He seemed to get better each time. He had a way of taking a word and turning it on its head, making witty comments, seizing an old New England saying and making it sound twice as profound as it was. There was always a sparkle in him, an impish quality. It was tremendously charming, and very self-conscious, though nobody minded that. It was a performance, and taken as such.”

One of the main stages from now until Frost’s death would be Bread Loaf Mountain in Ripton, Vermont. In 1921, Wilfred Davison of Middlebury College had founded the Bread Loaf School of English on the mountain campus of the college, twelve miles from the center of Middlebury itself. Five years later, at Frost’s suggestion, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference had been started by John Farrar, a New York publisher. (Frost once referred to the conference as the Two Weeks Manuscript Sales Fair—a sign that he resented the commercial aspects of the conference, which had been promoted by John Farrar.) Frost’s presence on the mountain became a huge part of its attraction to would-be writers, and he would lure to Bread Loaf many of his friends, including Untermeyer, who seemed never far behind whenever Frost appeared somewhere.

Untermeyer had become a student, not only of Frost’s verse, but of his lecturing. He declared (somewhat prematurely, in fact) that his friend had long since “overcome the nervousness preliminary to mounting the platform.… Feeling his way through a talk until it assumed the shape of an essay, [Frost] could not help enjoying the rapprochement and the response with which audiences enjoyed him. His remarks between the reading of his poems were peppered with epigrams. Some of them found their way into poems; some of them came from fragments of midnight conversations—he was at his voluble best after 11:00 P.M. Others were suggested by letters he had been writing.”2 Untermeyer lists some examples of these nocturnal Frostian epigrams:

I am not an escapist; on the contrary, I am a pursuitist. I would rather cast an idea by implication than cast a ballot.

I am also a separatist. You can’t mix things properly until you have separated them, unscrambled them from their original chaotic mixture and held them separate long enough to test their qualities and values.

Sometimes it strikes me that the writers of free verse got their idea from incorrect proof pages.

I am against all the isms as being merely ideas in and out of favor. The latest ideologies are formidable equations that resolve themselves into nothing more startling than that nothing equals nothing.

There are three ages of man: first, when he learns to let go with his hands; second, when he learns to let go with his heart; third, when he learns to let go with his head.

Frost liked to create schemas—an aspect of his love of form; the process was part of his method as a thinker, and this thinking eventually settled into lines of poetry. Increasingly his poems dealt with social themes, and these often went over well with audiences, since they were easy to follow and often amusing. “Departmental,” for example, was written in the thirties and remained a favorite at readings. The public liked it, though it was not among Frost’s better work. On the other hand, some of his discursive, political poems—“Build Soil,” written in 1932, is a good example of this—brought a discursive element into American poetry that had long been missing.

One of the impediments to Frost’s progress as a poet was the siege of bad health that would increasingly afflict him and his family throughout the thirties. In October 1930, the Frosts learned that Marjorie had contracted tuberculosis—still a dreaded illness, although contemporary treatments were increasingly effective and offered victims of the disease real hope for recovery. For Marjorie, this diagnosis meant that she must end her nursing studies at Johns Hopkins and go into a sanatorium.

Through the Bartletts, the Frosts heard about the Mesa Verde Sanatorium in Boulder, Colorado. This sanatorium was only a few blocks from the Bartlett home, and John and Margaret willingly took on the responsibility of looking after Marjorie while she was there. Almost coincidentally, Frost had agreed to attend the Rocky Mountain Writers’ Conference in Boulder during the following summer.

With Marjorie heavily on their minds, the Frosts moved to Amherst, as usual, for the winter months (when Frost would teach); in April, Elinor returned to South Shaftsbury while her husband “trooped the country as a poet,” as she wrote to Edith Fobes. He gave readings and lectures at various institutions, including Wesleyan, Yale, Harvard, Clark, Bates, and Bowdoin. He also delivered the six promised lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he found the audience “more sympathetic and less radical” than he had anticipated. The poet Marianne Moore attended these lectures and in a letter to Ezra Pound called him “one of the best speakers I have ever listened to.”3 This lecture stint was hard on Frost, however, and precipitated a severe case of influenza that kept him in bed for nearly two weeks in May.

Making matters even worse, Lillian was diagnosed with tuberculosis in May. She having been one of Marjorie’s closest friends in high school, it seemed like bizarre bad luck that both of them should be stricken by the same disease at the same time. Now Carol became frantic, and he decided that he must take Lillian and Prescott to California, where the weather would improve her health. The journey, by car, would be accomplished in slow stages, with long rest stops along the way so that Lillian would not get overly tired; a visit to Marjorie at Mesa Verde would be part of the itinerary.

As if these problems were not enough to preoccupy the elder Frosts, there was the added fact that Lesley, now living in Montauk, at the farthest point out on Long Island, was pregnant for the second time and unwell. Given the fragility of her marriage, it seemed appropriate for her parents to venture out to Montauk to assist her, or at least to lend moral support. They did so, and found her in considerable pain. Frost wrote to Untermeyer from the Southampton hospital, “I am in no mood to estimate myself or anything I ever did. Lesley is … in ineffectual pain and has been for three days now. We don’t understand what’s the matter.”4 As it turned out, there was nothing terribly wrong, and the child—Lesley Lee Francis—was born without complications on June 20, 1931.

In July, the Frosts visited Marjorie in Colorado. Elinor wrote to Edith Fobes: “Marjorie looks beautiful—she weighs 120 pounds and her skin is clear and firm. It was a most fortunate decision—to bring her here. The doctors think she has had T.B. for eight or ten years, and only six weeks ago the tuberculin test gave a very positive reaction. She intends to stay in this climate another year, at least, though not in the sanatorium. She will board somewhere and take a course at the University.”5

They took their daughter to Evergreen, a small town in the mountains—some eight thousand feet above sea level, where Frost spent ten days “botanizing” and stretching his lungs. The weather was perfect: fiercely blue skies, the air hot and dry. Frost went off by himself most days, a notebook in his pocket; it was a glorious, if brief, time, and he began work on several new poems.

He could not, however, stay away from his family troubles for long. Elinor was increasingly worried about Lillian and had anxieties about what might become of Carol and Prescott should her daughter-in-law require long-term hospitalization. Her original optimism about Marjorie also proved short-lived; now as she spent time with her daughter, she realized that her health was still extremely shaky. “Why are we so unfortunate?” she asked Edith Fobes in a letter from Evergreen. “I have worked so hard for my family all these years, and now everything seems tumbling around me.”6

From Colorado, the Frosts ventured to California to see Carol’s family; they had arrived, as planned, in San Bernardino. En route, by train, from Denver to Utah, Frost got the idea for “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind,” one of the often overlooked poems in A Further Range. “I was looking out of a train window away out in Utah and way in the night, and I saw one lonely light way off, you know, far from any other all around. I made a whole poem out of that,” he later remembered.7 The poem is written in couplets, a form that sometimes brought out the worst in Frost, perhaps because it forced him into a stance of cuteness as he reached for witty effects. In this poem, however, he manages to avoid posturing and cuteness; he is writing in his most skeptical mood, deriding the common habit of identifying with other people too easily, assuming too much about their motives. This all plays into the general political drift of the poems in A Further Range, which if not conservative in tone are distinctly antiliberal. The poet-narrator stares from his train window into the night and sees a light:

Something I saw or thought I saw

In the desert at midnight in Utah,

Looking out of my lower berth

At moonlight sky and moonlit earth.

The sky had here and there a star;

The earth had a single light afar,

A flickering, human pathetic light,

That was maintained against the night,

It seemed to me, by the people there,

With a God-forsaken brute despair.

It would flutter and fall in half an hour

Like the last petal off a flower.

With its thudding tetrameter, the poem mimics the sway of the train. The narrative swerves from the scene set in the above lines, however, moving toward a recognition that one cannot know what is really going on with other people, why they might light a fire or put it out. The heart, with its liberal sentiments (bordering on sentimentalities), was beginning to cloud the mind, where cool reason suggests that you cannot know another person’s heart. This theme would preoccupy Frost through the early thirties and dominate the poems of A Further Range, some of which can be read as a response to the New Deal, which Frost abhorred.8

“The Figure in the Doorway” is another train poem, based on the traveler’s observations. But this poem, despite several fetching lines, rarely moves beyond the level of light verse. The train in the poem passes a house with a “great gaunt figure” in a cabin door, and Frost is simply struck by the man’s isolation, “The miles and miles he lived from anywhere.” But the man’s existence was “evidently something he could bear.” Frost is guessing about this, of course—letting his own heart cloud his mind.

Frost was clearly struggling to rediscover his way as poet. “The way doesn’t get easier,” he told Reginald Cook, “only harder to find, what with so much underbrush growing.”9 The great temptation, of course, was to repeat himself (and, like most poets, he did plenty of this), but he also felt a need to go beyond what he had done, to explore a further range of thought and feeling.

*   *   *

The Frosts arrived on the West Coast to find Carol and his family staying at the California Hotel in San Bernardino. Carol was searching for a house to rent, and Frost helped him; they soon located a bungalow in Monrovia, near Pasadena, with a view of the San Gabriel Mountains. Carol would plant flowers and vegetables, and Lillian would recuperate there, under the care of a local TB specialist. The rent was cheap ($27.50 per month), and Frost would pay it. He was also paying for all of Marjorie’s care back in Colorado, and sending regular checks to Irma, too. It struck him as a particular piece of bad luck that he should have to be supporting his grown children in this fashion, but there was obviously no choice. The need to earn a living for his family, at this late stage, actually spurred him on. He could not simply retreat into depression, old age, lethargy, the shadows. He must get up and do something.

Frost had long been looking forward to returning to his native state. He was especially keen to revisit San Francisco, and he did so eagerly now with Elinor, although she was too unwell to accompany him on his walks. He was quite shocked by the degree of change in the city. In many instances, he could recognize nothing at all on a street that had once been familiar. One place he made sure to visit was the beach below Cliff House, not far from one end of what is now the Golden Gate Bridge: this was the setting for the poem “Once by the Pacific.” He stood looking out to sea on that pebbled beach, and he was overwhelmed by memories of his father and mother, of a lost and irrecoverable world. “You probably shouldn’t go back to places you knew when you were younger,” he later said after a reading of “Once by the Pacific.” “It brings on trouble, strange thoughts, dreams.”10

Before leaving for New England, the Frosts returned for a couple of final weeks with Carol, Lillian, and Prescott. From there, Elinor explained to Edith Fobes that Carol had rented Stone Cottage “for a year for $500 to people who will probably buy it before the year is over for $8,000.” She also noted that “if Lillian is cured he [Carol] may want to buy a small piece of land here. We can spare them $150 a month for at least two years, so they will be all right financially for a while, and I am greatly hoping that she will be well on the road to recovery by the end of two years.”11

They returned, by train, to South Shaftsbury in mid-September, whereupon Frost immediately set out for another lecture tour that took him from Maine to Philadelphia. He was determined to get his bank account as full as possible, especially now that ill-health was making the lives of his children terribly uncertain.

The grim health of the family, as of February 2, 1932, is suggested by one of Elinor’s letters to Mrs. Fobes:

I must tell you about Marjorie and Lillian. Marjorie has been declared by the specialist to be entirely free from the tuberculous “process,” and yet—she has twice had a spell of pleurisy—not with effusion—since the cold weather came on. She is still in the sanatorium, but has a good many callers, and goes out with friends she has made in the town and the University. She liked Boulder and the Colorado people very much indeed, and has had many kindnesses.…

Lillian has not improved as we hoped and expected she would when we left Monrovia. She seemed to gain for a few weeks, then quite suddenly, when some cloudy, damp weather came on, she went downhill very fast, so that her doctors easily persuaded her to go into a sanatorium and begin the pneumothorax treatment which means deflating her bad lung, you know, by pumping air into the pleural cavity. There were adhesions from previous scars of T.B. so that it was a little doubtful if the treatment would be effective. Fortunately, it has been very successful. From twenty treatments in thirty days, they have been gradually reduced to one each week, and the coughing has practically ceased. The doctor gives her every encouragement that she will live, but it will be a long and expensive fight and this of course leaves Carol and Prescott bereft. It may be that after five or six months of sanatorium treatment, she can go to the house with a practical nurse, and have the treatments there. I think she probably can. I am hoping though, that she and Carol will be willing to have me take Prescott for a year. The California schools are so much superior to ours, that in one way I would regret taking him out of the best, cheerful school he is in and bring him east, to our dingy dirty-brick buildings.12

Elinor also had to contend with her husband’s mania for buying real estate. He was tired of renting in Amherst, and real estate prices (because of the Depression) were low. In November, with Elinor’s nervous blessing, Frost purchased 15 Sunset Avenue, a substantial Victorian home that had belonged to a former president of Massachusetts State College. It was by far the grandest house that the Frosts had ever owned. He had it furnished in Victorian style by a decorator, complete with horsehair sofas, damask drapes, and an Axminster rug. Whimsically, Frost wrote to Marjorie that he and Elinor were “in possession of our Big Home and overwhelmed with the responsibilities of taste it lays upon us.”13

Much to the surprise of her parents, Marjorie had fallen in love with a student at the University of Colorado, Willard E. Fraser; Marjorie described him to her father as “a dear, kind, and considerate man, another real Victorian.” Fraser himself wrote to the Frosts to explain that he was hoping to marry Marjorie and that he planned to become an archaeologist. Frost was elated, and wrote back, “I am particularly glad you are bringing archaeology into the family. Archaeology is one of the four things I wanted most to go into in life, archaeology, astronomy, farming, and teaching Latin.”14 The Frosts made immediate plans to visit Colorado and California again the following summer, as soon as Frost dispensed with an obligation to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Columbia University, from which he would that year receive his ninth honorary degree.

His poem was “Build Soil.” To utter aloud this somewhat reactionary poem in this setting at the beginning of the Great Depression took courage. It contained none of the quasi-socialist sympathies current among intellectuals and artists in the United States at the moment. On the contrary, Frost explicitly makes an argument against socialism, or any form of group thinking. The poem is, for me, one of Frost’s most successful forays into the realm of political verse. As a format, he chose a well-known pastoral mode, writing in superficial imitation of Virgil’s “First Eclogue,” which takes the shape of a dialogue between two stock figures: the farmer (Tityrus) and the farmer-poet (Meliboeus). Lest anyone miss the Virgilian echo, Frost adopts their names, though he has them talking in distinctly twentieth-century terms:

Why, Tityrus! But you’ve forgotten me.

I’m Meliboeus the potato man,

The one you had the talk with, you remember,

Here on this very campus years ago.

Hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.

Meliboeus has had to “give [his] interval farm up”—an interval being a New England dialect term for land in a valley (as in the title of Frost’s Mountain Interval, where the term carries a double meaning, suggesting a pause in a journey as well as a dip in the landscape). He has taken to stony, uphill pastureland, where he can raise sheep. His attitude toward the farmer-poet is ambivalent: “You live by writing / Your poems on a farm and call that farming.” Frost’s blank verse is fluent and wonderfully simple. As W. H. Auden said of his style, “The music is always that of the speaking voice, quiet and sensible, and I cannot think of any modern poet, except Cavafy, who uses language more simply.”15

Tityrus (who represents Frost) confesses to being tempted to turn his poetic gifts to politics: “I have half a mind / To take a writing hand in politics.” It has, he notes, been done well before. He admits to thinking that the “times seem revolutionary bad.”

Meliboeus wonders how bad the times have become, and whether or not they warrant the poet leaving off the traditional themes of poetry for politics—themes such as “love’s alternations, joy and grief, / The weather’s alternations, summer and winter.” Then the talk turns to socialism as a possible solution to the crisis, and Tityrus suggests calmly that “socialism is / An element in any government.” But he is against the more general use of “love” as a concept in these political arrangements, as in love of the people. “There is no love” of this general kind, he argues: “There’s only love of men and women, love / Of children, love of friends, of men, of God.”

The poem meanders through an ingenious, utterly Frostian examination of the concept of freedom. “Everyone asks freedom for himself,” Frost muses, “The man free love, the business man free trade, / The writer and talker free speech and free press.” Everything, in Frost’s view, comes down to self-interest. The argument moves quickly into the concept of greed, which is intimately related to self-interest:

Greed has been taught a little abnegation

And shall be more before we’re done with it.

It is just fool enough to think itself

Self-taught. But our brute snarling and lashing taught it.

None shall be as ambitious as he can.

None should be as ingenious as he could.

That is, our “brute snarling and lashing” in the marketplace have brought on greed, which is bad because it ultimately limits ambition and ingenuity—an argument that is highly original and runs against the typical conservative grain.

Indeed, Frost is hardly a typical conservative; he is not, in fact, a conservative in the contemporary sense. He is an agrarian freethinker, a democrat with a small “d,” with isolationist and libertarian tendencies. “My friends all know I’m interpersonal,” Tityrus says. But long before “I’m interpersonal / Away ’way down inside I’m personal.” The poem goes on to talk about national identities:

Just so before we’re international

We’re national and act as nationals.

The colors are kept unmixed on the palette,

Or better on dish plates all around the room,

So the effect when they are mixed on canvas

May seem almost exclusively designed.

Some minds are so confounded intermental

They remind me of pictures on a palette.

Frost had used similar language in his talk to the Amherst Alumni Council, “Education by Poetry,” in which he spoke of the internationalists:

I should want to say to anyone like that: “Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please.… But, first, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other.”

I should like to use another metaphor on them. I want my palette, if I am a painter, I want my palette on my thumb or on my chair, all clean, pure, separate colors. Then I will do the mixing on the canvas. The canvas is where the work of art is, where we make the conquest. But we want the nations all separate, pure, distinct, things as separate as we can make them; and then in our thoughts, in our arts, and so on, we can do what we please about it.

In this period Frost often moved from prose to poetry, formulating his ideas in lectures and letters, then putting them into verse. In fact, much of the central thinking that went into “Build Soil” is found in a letter to Louis Untermeyer that was sent from South Shaftsbury on May 13, 1931. It was headed by a motto from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”: “Courage he said and pointed toward the land” (Frost’s italics). The letter was written to encourage Untermeyer, who had just purchased a farm in the Adirondacks:

The land be your strength and refuge. But at the same time I say this so consonant with your own sentiments of the moment, let me utter a word of warning against the land as an affectation. What determines the population of the world is not at all the amount of tillable land it affords: but it is something in the nature of the people themselves that limits the size of the globulate mass they are socially capable of. There is always, there will always be, a lot, many lots of land left out of the system. I dedicate these lots to the stray souls who from incohesiveness feel rarely the need of the forum for their thoughts of the market for their wares and produce. They raise a crop of rye, we’ll say. To them it is green manure. They plow it under. They raise a crop of endives in their cellar. They eat it themselves. That is they turn it under. They have an idea. Instead of rushing into print with it, they turn it under to enrich the soil. Out of that idea they have another idea. Still they turn that under. What they finally venture doubtfully to publication with is an idea of an idea of an idea.

There is Frostian brilliance here, an example of the way he can extend metaphor further and further into thought. The essential point of “Build Soil” concerns plowing under the first crops, of letting the land go fallow, of not stripping the soil but enriching it. It makes good sense in both farming and writing, and Frost was perpetually drawn to the figurative alliance between these two arts. Thus, Tityrus condemns those poets who rush into print, just as he chastises those farmers who rush to market:

More that should be kept back—the soil for instance

In my opinion,—though we both know poets

Who fall all over each other to bring soil

And even subsoil and hardpan to market.

To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,

Is an unpardonable sin in farming.

The moral is, make a late start to market.

The poem builds to a fine frenzy of oracular didacticism as Tityrus gives his best advice to Meliboeus:

You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,

Poor castaway of commerce, and so live

That none shall ever see you come to market—

Not for a long long time. Plant, breed, produce,

But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,

Eat it or plow it under where it stands

To build the soil. For what is more accursed

Than an impoverished soil, pale and metallic?

What cries more to our kind for sympathy?

“Build Soil” is an Emersonian plea for self-reliance, a quirky caution against excessive reliance on the market economy, a warning about the rush to internationalism, or socialism, or any “ism.” It is the lone striker’s grand testament. As Frost’s Tityrus says at the end:

Steal away and stay away.

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.

Join the United States and join the family—

But not much in between unless a college.

Independence of thought, for Frost, goes hand in hand with financial and ideological independence.

Frost actually took his own advice, spending many years, even decades, “plowing it under” and building soil—in Derry, for example, the years when so much was sown and very little reaped or sent to market. He let ideas come, but felt no compulsion to rush into print with them; he let them play in his head, play on his tongue in endless conversations; he put them into letters, into prose, which formed a kind of halfway stage between speech and poetry. What reached print was “an idea of an idea of an idea.” When it finally emerged, it was fully formed and richly developed.

*   *   *

The Frosts left for California soon after he received another honorary degree, this time from Williams College, on June 20. He had hoped to duck out of sight for a few months in order to work on his poems, and California seemed a good place for this. He had few friends or connections there, apart from Carol’s family. His son had found him a house in Monrovia that afforded a majestic view of the mountains—something Frost always appreciated—and it was within walking distance of Carol’s place, so that Elinor could easily move back and forth between the two houses. A three-month lease was signed. He wrote to Otto Manthey-Zorn on July 4, 1932, “Here we are just moved into the fifth house owned or rented by the Frosts in this year of our Independence 157. The question is how independent anyone can be with so many houses to live in.”16

En route to California, the Frosts had stopped in Colorado to visit with Marjorie and meet their prospective son-in-law, Willard Fraser, for the first time. They had of course already heard a good deal about him from their daughter, and had corresponded with him. He was “as good as his letters,” Frost observed. A firm bond—one that lasted—was struck.

Willard was about to leave on an archaeological expedition to Mexico, where he had previously done research. While he was gone, Marjorie would go to California to stay with her parents. She planned to remain there, with Carol and Lillian, for a little while after her parents left, then go to visit Willard’s family in Montana before coming back, ultimately, to the Vermont house for Christmas.

The Frosts made a zigzag journey home in October, stopping for lectures and readings in various places, including Boulder, Omaha, and Ann Arbor. The next big event on Frost’s schedule was a meeting with T. S. Eliot at the St. Botolph Club in Boston on November 15. Eliot was delivering the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, where he was being lionized by faculty and students. At the St. Botolph Club meeting that Frost attended, he addressed a small circle of younger admirers (many of them poets, including Robert Hillyer and John Brooks Wheelwright). Asked to read a poem at one point, Eliot agreed, on the condition that Frost also read one. Frost agreed, but said he would have to write one on the spot while Eliot recited his. He immediately took out a small notebook and began to scribble. Eliot was confused but went ahead with a recital of “The Hippopotamus.” When Frost’s turn came, he read “My Olympic Record Stride,” a poem actually written some months before in California and memorized (indeed, Frost had recited it from memory to an audience a few weeks before, so it was fresh in his mind). He pretended to improvise the last stanza on the spot. There was dutiful applause, and nobody but Frost seemed to understand—or appreciate—the joke.

Christmas in Vermont was a dismal affair. Marjorie was there, with Irma and her husband, John, and their son, Jacky. Everyone except Elinor came down with the flu, and poor Elinor was run ragged looking after them. Frost himself took to his bed, though he joined everyone for meals, where much of the conversation centered on Marjorie’s upcoming wedding in the summer. It would take another month or so before it was finally agreed that Billings, Montana—Willard’s hometown—was the appropriate setting. (Frost himself did not like family ceremonies, and was relieved to have the occasion off his and Elinor’s shoulders.)

After the New Year, the Frosts returned to their home in Amherst. Frost plunged into teaching, then in April set off for the usual round of readings and lectures. On May 31, 1933, Elinor wrote to Richard Thornton:

We are still in Amherst. We have lingered here because of Robert’s health. Two days after he was in New York, he came down with a bad cold. It was a queer cold, with a temperature, and has been followed by a prolonged period of temperature and prostration. He has very little appetite, and is intensely nervous. The doctor is watching him, with tuberculosis in mind, and advises absolute quiet for an indefinite period, that is, an avoidance of whatever might be a physical or nervous strain. He stays in bed until dinner time, and then dresses and wanders around the house, and if it is sunny, sits a little while outdoors.17

One is amazed by the endless succession of illnesses recorded by Elinor, month after month. These bouts of flu may have been related to the depression that Frost was always, on some level, fending off. Elinor often notes in her letters that “Robert has taken to his bed,” with or without obvious cause. He went through prolonged periods when he could not teach, or travel, or write.

Frost barely made it through the wedding in Montana, which took place in June, and spent much of the summer ailing. He found himself short of breath, easily tired, and prone to fevers and racking coughs. The suspicion arose that he might have contracted tuberculosis, an old fear that seems never to have left him. His doctor in South Shaftsbury suggested that he think about spending the winters in a warm climate, such as Florida. (In later years, Frost would in fact follow this advice, eventually buying a place in South Miami.) The current illness was exacerbated by his annual bout with hay fever. All previously arranged readings and lectures were canceled in the late summer and early fall of 1933.

One of the few good things to come out of this period was the poem “Desert Places,” which Frost claimed (as usual) to have written straight through from beginning to end “without fumbling a sentence.”18 The poem opens with a breathless moment of realization:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past.

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

Frost notes that the “animals are smothered in their lairs,” a striking image of claustrophobic despair. Then he goes on, shockingly:

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

It would be hard to overpraise the stark brilliance of the last line above, with its suggestion of the mingling of interior and exterior realities. The snow-covered landscape, so muffled and blank, mirrors an inner feeling of isolation and spiritual poverty:

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less—

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

For equal severity, one would have to turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s so-called Terrible Sonnets, especially the one that opens: “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” Like Hopkins, Frost would sink into a deep melancholy, then cast his thoughts upon the landscape around him, finding in that external reality a corresponding vision of bleakness.

The poet in “Desert Places” looks up at the stars and says: “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars,” alluding to Pascal, who spoke of the “infinite silent spaces between the stars.” In the chilling final couplet, Frost concludes: “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”

“Provide, Provide,” which Randall Jarrell has justly called “an immortal masterpiece,” was also written during this dark time. One cannot imagine a less sentimental, wiser poem, or one that makes such an expedient, minimalist suggestion about how we should live our lives. The poem is, at once, a wry commentary on Roosevelt’s New Deal (and its bureaucracy) and a paean to self-sufficiency; it opens with an allusion to Abishag, who is mentioned in 1 Kings 1:3 as a beautiful Shunammite maiden who came to attend the dying King David. But Abishag is now “the withered hag,” and is pictured washing the steps “with pail and rag.” All beauty fades. As Frost notes: “Too many fall from great and good / For you to doubt the likelihood.”

The poem is written in strong, four-beat (tetrameter) rhyming triplets, with “plenty of tune,” as Frost said before reading it at Bread Loaf one summer. The poet advises people to die early and “avoid the fate” of Abishag or, if you must die late, “Make up your mind to die in state.” With breathtaking cynicism, he says, “Make the whole stock exchange your own! / If need be occupy a throne, / Where nobody can call you crone.” The last three stanzas are among Frost’s most compressed and startling:

Some have relied on what they knew,

Others on being simply true.

What worked for them might work for you.

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!

In other words, provide for yourself (rather than let somebody else provide for you—and probably provide something you do not really want). You cannot rely on memory of past stardom or success; these simply do not help. Rely on experience, or your sense of truth, if you can.

Frost’s poetry in the early thirties ran deeply against the grain of what was being said and written in intellectual circles, as Stanley Burnshaw says in Robert Frost Himself. Burnshaw notes that people were often overheard talking about “where Frost stood” with regard to the current political scene. They were aware he was not a leftist or a liberal, but they found him difficult to read. “No poet alive could be more elusive,” Burnshaw says, “though we granted from all that was argued about ‘Build Soil’ that Frost’s views were not our views and his faith—whatever it was—differed from ours. And in terms of political practice and program, we were probably on opposing sides.”19

By “we” Burnshaw refers to that group of urban intellectuals who subscribed to such journals as the weekly New Masses, which Burnshaw edited. Oddly enough, Burnshaw and Frost became good friends, which suggests that Frost was not prickly about the politics of those around him; he was quite happy to surround himself with people who thought differently from himself. (Untermeyer, for instance, was a man of the left—and he was Frost’s closest intellectual companion through much of his adult life.)

Two other major poems of this period were “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” which had actually been written a year earlier, in California, and was revised for publication in the fall of 1933, and “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which has long been a favorite of anthologists. The latter was based on an incident that happened several years before on the farm in Franconia. The poem has an almost mythic opening:

Out of the mud two strangers came

And caught me splitting wood in the yard.

And one of them put me off my aim

By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”

I knew pretty well why he dropped behind

And let the other go on a way.

I knew pretty well what he had in mind:

He wanted to take my job for pay.

These were stressful economic times, and tramps were everywhere—honest men, mostly, in search of a meager living. Frost’s narrator, as the second stanza makes clear, is enjoying his work: “every piece I squarely hit / Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.” Few poets in the history of English verse have written so well about work, or the pleasure of doing physical chores.

“The sun was warm but the wind was chill,” he writes in the third stanza, describing with freshness and particularity the feel of a volatile April day in northern New England, when you hover between March and May, depending on the wind and sun. The narrator notes that the mere fact of these two tramps showing up and wanting his job makes him enjoy the job even more. He does not want to relinquish it, even though he knows he should. The penultimate stanza puts the matter frankly: “My right [to work] might be love but theirs was need.” And when it came down to love against need, “Theirs was the better right—agreed.”

Agreed. That’s the final political or moral point. But Frost’s speaker in the poem cannot leave off there. He concludes:

But yield who will to their separation,

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.

“I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation,” Frost said, echoing his poem, in a letter to R. P. T. Coffin.20 As usual, the poet takes away with one hand what he has given with the other, suggesting that, with his head, he knows that need overrides love in situations such as that posed in this poem. Yet he refuses to let it rest there. He wants to make a generalization about how, ideally, “love and need are one,” even though the concrete situation of the poem seems to contradict this notion. As always in Frost’s best work, various levels of argument swirl below the surface. It is pointless to complain, as Malcolm Cowley does, that the speaker in the poem should have offered these homeless men some other work if he was too selfish to give up the chopping himself.21

If the poem is based on a real incident (as Frost suggested it was), he may well have offered the men work. Nevertheless, the literal truth of any poem is subordinate to its imaginative truth, so it becomes pointless to worry about what “did” or “didn’t” happen. “You never know where a poem comes from,” Frost said, “but where it’s gone, that you can tell. You can see the tail, the trace of the comet, after it’s gone.”22

*   *   *

Marjorie was expecting a baby in March, so Elinor set out alone in February to be with her during the final weeks before the birth. She left her husband to his teaching duties at Amherst, though she was uneasy about his weakened condition. He did, however, seem better now, and had resumed his regular level of activity. The baby was born on March 16, a daughter called Marjorie Robin Fraser, and two weeks later Elinor rushed back to Amherst because Frost appeared to have suffered a relapse. He was coughing again, and had taken to his bed with a fever.

But Elinor was no sooner home than word came that Marjorie had taken a bad turn. She had come down with puerperal fever, as a complication of childbirth, and was delirious. As soon as they could, the Frosts went together back to Billings, to Marjorie’s side. Six weeks later, the doctors suggested that Marjorie be flown by private plane to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Puerperal fever was often fatal, but doctors at the Mayo Clinic had recently developed some new and promising treatments. It was Marjorie’s best hope for survival, and Frost decided to spare no expense. They were themselves driven to the clinic by Willard, while the baby was left in the care of a nurse.

It was all to no avail, however, and Marjorie died on May 2, 1934. “I told you by telegram what was hanging over us,” Frost wrote to Untermeyer. “So you know what to expect. Well, the blow has fallen. The noblest of us all is dead and has taken our hearts out of the world with her.”23 In a similar vein, Elinor wrote to Edith Fobes, “Poor darling child—it seems too heart-breaking, that after achieving good health, and finding perfect happiness in life, she had to lose it all so soon.”24 The family now entered a period of dark, seemingly endless, mourning.