2

HOME IS WHERE THEY HAVE TO TAKE YOU IN
1886–1892

Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.

—FROST, “POETRY AND SCHOOL”

It is hard to imagine what that long journey eastward must have felt like for Belle Frost. Penniless, having to cast herself on the pity of her in-laws, whom she reflexively disliked, she must have summoned every ounce of internal strength to present herself at the front door of their austere, three-story clapboard house at 370 Haverhill Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River, twenty-five miles north of Boston.

A second funeral service was held for Will Frost, whose coffin was buried at the Bellevue Cemetery. The elder Frosts, and their community, offered a chilly welcome to this bereft, impoverished family. Frost later recalled: “At first I disliked the Yankees. They were cold. They seemed narrow to me. I could not get used to them.”1 In particular, Grandfather Frost, with his flowing white beard and small, wire-rimmed glasses—an important man in this working-class community, and a dominant figure in this small mill town—seemed austere. Grandmother Frost, an intense, nervous woman, was scarcely any warmer. Belle Frost’s openness of manner, her liberal idea of child rearing, and her Swedenborgian serenity did not settle well with the elder Frosts, who may also have blamed her on some unspoken level for the early death of their beloved Willie.

The Frosts did, however, provide a temporary home for their son’s beleaguered family. Belle at once began looking for a job in teaching, although the market in elementary school education was saturated, and her qualifications were not exceptional. She had considerable teaching experience, in Ohio and at Lewistown, but she had no college degree or teaching certificate. After six painful months of searching, she landed a meager post as the fifth-grade teacher at an elementary school in Salem, ten miles from Lawrence, just over the New Hampshire border, with a salary of four hundred dollars a year. Desperate to move away from the elder Frosts, Belle found a two-room apartment for herself and the children near Salem.

There is a photograph of Belle Frost taken outside her school surrounded by almost three dozen children.2 She is tall, angular, and slightly hunched, with a broad forehead and dark, penetrating eyes that stare ahead with determination. Her graying hair is bunched at the back, with a lock straying over her face. She wears rimless glasses and looks more like a grandmother than a middle-aged mother. Young Robbie is standing beside her, serious and handsome, and Jeanie is nearby: her hair tumbles to her shoulders, and she has a slightly defiant look on her face.

It was not an easy life, especially for Belle, who apparently had difficulty controlling her classes and found few friends in the Salem area. Her best attention was lavished on Robbie and Jeanie, to whom she often read poetry in the evenings. “‘That Robbie can do anything,’ my mother would say,” the poet recalled in later years. “I’d sometimes complain or run off to go swimming, but on the whole I guess I liked to try myself out in a job—helping a man load a wagon, pile firewood, rake or hoe. It was all odd jobs in those days. I liked working with characters, listening to them, their stories, the way they had to tell a story—the country was full of characters.”3

Some of Frost’s happier times during this period were spent in Amherst, New Hampshire, on the farm of his Aunt Sarah (his father’s sister), who had married a man called Ben Messer, always called “Uncle Messer” by the children. He was an outgoing, robust man who appreciated the unhappy circumstances of these children. Frost recalled “joining the Messers for blueberry and raspberry picking” in the summers. The Messer farm offered a welcome escape from the tiny apartment in Salem, and it provided Frost with his first taste of rural imagery: the dirt roads shadowed by huge elms, the luxuriant pastureland surrounded by stone walls, grazing herds of cows, horse-drawn ploughs, beautifully weathered barns, and farm machinery. There were stands of maple trees for sugaring, and woodlots full of beech and pine. Frost tried his hand, for the first time, at swinging birches. “It was almost sacrilegious,” he told an audience once, “climbing a birch tree till it bent, till it gave and swooped to the ground. But that’s what boys did in those days.”4

Frost liked going to school in Salem, and having his mother as teacher. He won the respect of his classmates because of his talent for hurling a baseball; in the school yard on weekends and after school, he developed a fastball, which he called a “jump ball,” a curve, and a drop ball. His first career goal, as of 1886, was to pitch in the major leagues. “He loved to talk about baseball,” said a friend, “and knew the players going back half a century—even minor ones.”5 He played into late middle age, often dazzling his colleagues and students at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference with his pitching ability and determination. “He played to win,” recalled Reginald L. Cook, a professor of American literature at Middlebury College and the director of the Bread Loaf Graduate School of English. “In fact, if he didn’t win, there was a price to pay. Winning was the point, he would say.”6

The Frosts moved from apartment to apartment in Salem, eventually landing in the sympathetic company of Mr. and Mrs. Loren E. Bailey, who were immigrants from Scotland. They occupied a mid-nineteenth-century farmhouse on a windy knoll, with a wide porch and clapboard siding. Behind the house were a barn and a large chicken coop, where Bailey kept several dozen chickens, much to Frost’s delight. Because he had, in San Francisco, dabbled in raising chickens, the prospect of helping Bailey was attractive. There was also a small cobbler shop attached to the barn, and Bailey had hired several workers to staff his small business. Frost was encouraged to work there on weekends and after school; indeed, he’d already had some experience in shoemaking in Salem, and he liked working with his hands. The job consisted of nailing shanks, three nails to each side of the shoe; the boy could earn as much as a dollar and a half a day, an important supplement to the family income.

It was clear to Belle Frost by now that her son had a gift for learning. He excelled in all subjects at school and begged his mother to read to him in the evening from various favorite books, such as Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. This was supplemented by readings from traditional ballads, mostly Scottish, and from Percy’s Reliques—perhaps the most widely used anthology of all time, next to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Belle also read aloud from Ossian, Poe, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Bryant, among other poets. Frost learned Bryant’s classic “To a Waterfowl” by heart, and would recite it to himself while working beside Mr. Bailey in the shoemaking shop. But Emerson was his favorite, and would become a crucial influence on his thought.

Life continued to be difficult for Belle Frost, in part because she could not easily control a roomful of children. Her inward nature, compounded by a refusal to act in authoritarian ways, often produced chaos in the classroom. On several occasions parents grew impatient with her. At one point, a school board meeting was called to see whether or not she must be fired. She wasn’t, mostly because an influential friend on the school board admired her. But the writing was on the wall. Belle soon took a job in the nearby town of Methuen, Massachusetts, hoping she could put the trouble in the Salem school behind her.

*   *   *

Although they lived in Methuen, Frost and his sister, Jeanie, traveled each day to the neighboring town of Lawrence to attend high school at their father’s alma mater. It was the fall of 1888, and both Frosts had passed the entrance exams with flying colors (Jeanie had done even better than Robbie). One had to choose one of two basic programs: the classical or the general, also known as the Latin and the English tracks. It went without saying that Frost would opt for the first: it was the course that Will Frost had followed, and it was designed to prepare a student for college work.

In keeping with the revival of classical learning that was part of the Victorian age, Frost’s teachers prescribed a heavy dose of Greek and Roman history, with classical languages at the center of the curriculum. “I read Virgil, Homer, Horace, and the rest—all before I even went to college,” Frost later said. “I don’t think the teacher understood how much poetry was in those pages.” He took himself seriously as a scholar, rising to the top of his class of thirty-two students, where he remained until his graduation. (His grades for 1888–89 included a 96 in Latin—something of a record for that era, when few students ever crossed the line into the 90s.)

During the summer of 1889, he devoted himself in the evenings and on weekends to reading books not found in the classical course at Lawrence: Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Mary Hartwell Catherwood’s The Romance of Dollard, and Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. Weekdays were spent working on the farm with Mr. Bailey. Robbie was assigned the task of haying, and he learned to use a pitchfork properly for the first time. He was also taught to use a grindstone, and to build a stone wall.

Frost remained something of a loner well into his sophomore year, when he met Carl Burell, a young man in his mid-twenties who had returned to school to complete his education after a decade of supporting himself by doing odd jobs in Vermont and New Hampshire. Burell had a strong interest in books, and he made regular forays into the public library in Lawrence. He had taken a room with Frost’s great-uncle, Elihu Colcord, and Frost would often visit him there after school. Burell was keenly interested in the science of botany, and he succeeded in winning his younger friend’s attention with books that offered detailed drawings of local flora—an interest that would have a crucial impact on Frost’s later work. Burell also introduced him to many of the great American humorists: Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, Josh Billings, Petroleum V. Nasby, John Phoenix, Orpheus C. Kerr. (It is worth noting that Frost, whose father had died when he was still a boy, was strongly attracted to someone older than himself, a figure of authority who was not, like his grandfather, remote and frightening.)

The debate over evolution was in the air, and Burell was reading closely the writings on this subject by men like Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. About this time Frost inherited a copy of Our Place Among Infinities, by Richard A. Proctor. Though its primary subject is the evolution of the universe, it also takes up the related issues of theology and cosmology—subjects that would continue to fascinate Frost to the end of his life. It was in Proctor that he first came across the “argument from design,” which became a subject in “Design,” one of his most ferocious, and original, poems—although his reading of Darwin was perhaps more important here, since Darwin’s principle of natural selection deeply altered the argument.7 The impression this book made on Frost was such that he continued to refer to it decades later; indeed, in 1935 his wife, Elinor, wrote to a friend: “One of the books longest in his possession came to him from a friend of his father’s in San Francisco, who died in the early eighties—Proctor’s Our Place Among the [sic] Infinities. He read it several times about 1890 and got a telescope through the Youth’s Companion. He has been astronomical ever since.”8

Carl Burell was also a budding writer, contributing verse and prose pieces to the High School Bulletin. Frost read this work and decided he might well try his hand at some poetry. He had just finished reading Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, and this inspired a ballad. “The lines came into my head walking home from school,” he recalled. The quatrains were written down quickly, at the kitchen table in his grandmother’s house. The poem was called “La Noche Triste,” referring to a horrible night when the Spaniards retreated in disarray across the causeway over Lake Tezcuco from the island city of Tenochtitlán. It was published in the Bulletin in April 1890, in the poet’s second year at Lawrence High School—quite an accomplishment for a sophomore. This was followed a month later by a second poem, “Song of the Wave,” evoking images of the sea below Cliff House in San Francisco—a dry run for “Once by the Pacific,” one of his memorable later poems.

Meanwhile, the family had moved into a small apartment in a poor section of Lawrence. By the summer of 1890, their finances were so wretched that Belle Frost moved the three of them to Maine, where all were employed by a hotel in Ocean Park, twenty miles south of Portland. Belle and Jeanie worked as chambermaids, while Frost fetched groceries and mail, carried suitcases, painted woodwork, and mowed lawns. The only recreation, for Frost, occurred on the tennis courts in the evenings, when he was often called on to make up a fourth in doubles with the guests.

Belle Frost returned to a job as teacher in the Merrill District School in Methuen that fall, while her children eagerly began their third year at Lawrence High School. The previous spring, Frost had been admitted to the Debating Society, having been sponsored by Carl Burell and the boy who edited the Bulletin, Ernest Jewell. One of the subjects that most attracted Frost was a debate framed as: “Resolved, that Bryant was a greater poet than Whittier.” Carl spoke first, in the affirmative, followed by Frost, who was apparently eloquent on the subject. A second debate concerned “a bill for removing the Indians from Indian Territory to more fertile districts and ceding said districts to the tribes forever; and for giving them some compensation for the losses already suffered.”

Frost hurled himself into his studies, aware that in the spring of his junior year he would have to take some preliminary entrance exams at Harvard, where he assumed he would go after graduation. His interest in Latin, in particular, grew intense under the strict but inspired tutelage of a young teacher, Miss Newell, who recognized in Frost a pupil of special promise. He spent hours at home, in the evenings, translating passages from Cicero, Tacitus, Virgil, and Ovid. He later recalled “translating, and performing in class, passages from the Roman playwrights, too—Plautus in particular.”9

Frost entered his senior year on top of the world. He was elected chief editor of the High School Bulletin, and most of his teachers and fellow students considered him the leading scholar in the Class of 1892, although Elinor Miriam White was hard on his heels as top student. “I didn’t know I was head of the class of 1892,” Frost later recalled. “In the third year it became a school issue and I was in distress. There was a rivalry between the Greek and Latin teachers, and Elinor bobbed up in the last year as a rival.”10

Elinor was a brilliant girl, and Frost had been noting her presence for some time. She was enrolled in the general course, and so he did not commonly meet her in class, although he had often seen her in the school yard or in the halls. Her father had been a Universalist minister in Lawrence, but had abandoned his calling. She was a year and a half older than Frost, and had missed a good deal of school owing to a mysterious disease called “slow fever”—a sickness that entailed fevers and periods of acute exhaustion. Their friendship did not really begin in earnest until the winter of their senior year, when their rivalry for class valedictorian was at its height—although Frost feigned absolute indifference to the situation. (He later claimed that he told the principal just to give the honor to Elinor, but that the principal refused and called it a tie.)

Frost sat the Harvard entrance exams in October 1891, as expected, finishing seventh in English literature, a subject he had never studied formally in school. That visit to Cambridge prompted a poem in tripping anapests, which began:

As I went down through the common,

    It was bright with the light of day,

For the wind and rain had swept the leaves

    And the shadow of summer away.

The walks were all fresh-blacked with rain

    As I went briskly down:—

I felt my own quick step begin

    The pace of the winter town.

Already, Frost has begun to apply the rhythms of a natural speaking voice to a traditional meter, casting off all worries about regularity. “I felt my own quick step begin,” for example, calls attention to itself by the even spread of the stresses from foot to foot. The imagery, too, shows promise: “The walks were all fresh-blacked with rain.”

That same fall, in addition to editing the Bulletin and breezing toward first place in the classical course, Frost played on the varsity football team. His interest in baseball had always been strong, but football was another matter. A colleague on the school paper wrote in salute of Frost’s talents: “No one would think the man who played football on the right end was the same person who sits with spectacles astride his nose in the Chief Editor’s Chair. Keep up the good work, Bobby.”11

It would have been especially nice if Jeanie had managed to keep up with her brother, but this was not the case. She had always been a nervous girl, but her condition worsened in her junior year. She moved back and forth between periods of extreme insomnia, when she would keep Frost and her mother awake into the wee hours of the morning, and stretches of bleak depression, when she could hardly manage to leave her bedroom. At times, her temper flared, and she seemed frighteningly out of control. Often, she sulked and refused to socialize with her classmates. Belle Frost noted in a letter to a friend that Jeanie was “beyond reaching”; her situation made her incapable of steady academic work by her senior year. She did not, as her mother had hoped she might, apply to any colleges; indeed, after a bout of typhoid fever in December of her final year in school, she dropped out permanently. Belle called her “my poor fragile girl,” and fretted about her eventual prospects.

Frost himself was quite troubled by Jeanie’s condition. He was also acutely conscious of his own tendency toward anxiety and depression, and worried about skidding down the same slope. Perhaps in reaction, he applied himself to his activities, academic and otherwise, with increased strength, even fury. A pattern of behavior was established wherein Frost, to compensate for his depressive bent, would hurl himself into frentic activity—a pattern that stayed with him to the end.

His term as chief editor ended in January 1892, under complex circumstances. Jeanie had been hospitalized in December 1891, and Frost (apparently unwell himself) stayed away from school during her illness. Before leaving, however, he instructed his staff at the Bulletin to assemble enough material for future issues. When he came back to school, in January, he discovered that no December issue had been published and that the vaults were empty of copy. He was furious, and first thought of resigning, then decided to write enough himself to complete an issue. “I got mad,” he said, “and I went down to the printer’s office, and in the little cubby hole down there I wrote the whole number. I wrote a story; I wrote an essay; I wrote editorials; I wrote a poem … and I wrote a fictitious report of the debating society. And then I wrote a fictitious article on exchange magazines. I wrote the whole thing myself right there, delivered it to the printer’s devil, and resigned!”12

He was, however, later invited to serve temporarily as acting editor, and he took the occasion to contribute to the Bulletin several fascinating, precocious editorials. He had by now clearly severed most ties with his mother’s religious views, and his reading of Darwin, Huxley, and Proctor was beginning to bear fruit. He divided the world three ways in one of these pieces, into “unquestioning followers” of religious custom, “enemies,” and “rethinkers.” He now put Carl Burell, secretly, in that class of “enemies”—those who simply reject an idea because it seems conventional. He put himself into the “rethinker” category, identifying with those who “follow custom—not without question, but where it does not conflict with the broader habits of life gained by wanderers among ideas.”13

These “dangerous” notions brought Frost into conflict with his mother, as might be expected. They apparently quarrelled frequently about his seeming “atheism,” although Frost consistently defended himself against this charge. He was not an atheist, he maintained, though he did subscribe to many of the views put forward by people who were. At one point he referred to himself, with a touch of self-flattery, as a “freethinker,” and his mother objected: “Oh, please don’t use that word. It has such a dreadful history.”14

Frost determined to go his own way, or to seem to go his own way, as in “The Road Not Taken,” his most famous poem, which he ends with a wry self-critical note that he will be telling people “with a sigh” that he “took the road less traveled by.” In fact, Frost was a rugged traditionalist, a man highly conscious of the forms, and one who found his freedom within the limits of those forms. Part of his great originality lay with this discovering of freedom within form, a way of extending a given tradition in a direction that seemed to redefine it.

Frost’s interest in English poetry, per se, acquired new dimensions in the spring of his senior year as he began, haltingly, to court Elinor White. They often met, after school, in the Lawrence Public Library, a small but stately building surrounded by elms. Elinor had focused her studies on English poetry, and she was able to introduce Frost to poets like Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Clare, and Edward Young. In turn, Frost presented her with books by two of his favorite contemporary poets, Edward Rowland Sill, whose work he had come across in the Century Magazine, and Emily Dickinson, whose poetry had recently been published (posthumously) for the first time. Dickinson would become a major influence on Frost’s own verse.

The principal of Lawrence High School, Nathaniel Goodwin, divided the final valedictory honors between Frost and Elinor. Thus far, their courtship had been slow, even desultory; now, as they shared with each other their separate graduation speeches, it struck them simultaneously that their interests and temperaments were surprisingly similar. Both adored poetry; furthermore, both felt, to some degree, like outcasts in Lawrence. Elinor’s own family circumstances were no less troubled and troubling than Frost’s: her father’s financial situation had recently gone from bad to worse, and he was barely holding the family together with occasional carpentry jobs; her parents fought constantly, about money and—more seriously—about Elinor’s neurotic sister, who (much like Jeanie) had recently dropped out of school for emotional reasons.

Elinor’s valedictory speech was entitled “Conversation as a Force in Life,” an intriguing subject, given her attachment to a man who prized conversation—his own, in particular—over almost anything. Frost delivered a somewhat obscure, grandiloquent speech called “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled,” where he intoned, “Not in the strife of action, is the leader made, nor in the face of crisis, but when all is over, when the mind is swift with keen regret, in the long after-thought. The after-thought of one action is the forethought of the next.”

In essence, Frost was elaborating on a theme made extremely popular in the nineteenth century by thinkers like Thomas Carlyle, who celebrated in extravagant terms the rise of the individual. “It is when alone,” Frost continued, “in converse with their own thoughts so much that they live their own conventionalities, forgetful of the world’s, that they [the great leaders] form those habits called the heroism of genius, and lead the progress of the race.”

The graduation took place on a muggy afternoon, a Thursday, at the end of June in the upstairs auditorium of City Hall, a sturdy granite building on the town common. The stage was lavishly decorated with cut flowers and potted plants. Thirty-two seniors graduated that day, and Frost was the last of thirteen speakers. He was so overcome by anxiety by the time his turn came that he nearly bolted from the building. He did, however, manage to deliver the address, and was called back onto center stage by the superintendent of schools, who awarded him the Hood Prize, “for excellence in academic work and general deportment.”

On the following morning, one of the local newspapers commented on Frost’s speech, suggesting that it “combined in a rare degree poetic thought, a fine range of imagination, and devotion to a high ideal, and evinced intellectual compass much beyond the usual school essay.”15 Elinor was also given high marks for her “thoughtful and praiseworthy piece of work.”

The emotional high point of the summer was nevertheless deeply private. By the end of June, Frost’s feelings for Elinor had become intense, and they were reciprocated. One afternoon, walking in the fields just beyond the edge of town, they secretly pledged to marry. Frost wanted Elinor to marry him at once, arguing that if he went to Harvard, she could go to the Harvard Annex (as Radcliffe College was then called), but this flew in the face of her parents’ recent decision to send her to St. Lawrence University, in Canton, New York. Elinor firmly, patiently, fended him off. He was, after all, only eighteen (and she was nearly twenty). There would, she argued, be plenty of time for marriage when their circumstances were different.

*   *   *

Frost had never really doubted that he would go to Harvard, but in the spring of his senior year at Lawrence he stumbled on his grandparents’ objections. Harvard, they argued, was “a drinking place.” They remembered only too vividly what had happened there to their son. Belle Frost agreed with her in-laws, arguing that it was full of freethinkers—just the sort of people who might lead her impressionable son in the wrong direction. A teacher whom Frost admired had graduated from Dartmouth College, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and he now suggested that Frost follow in his footsteps. Neither Belle nor the elder Frosts knew much about Dartmouth, but they decided to take up this suggestion.

Frost applied to Dartmouth and was offered a scholarship that covered most of the tuition costs. Room and board was to be paid by Frost’s grandparents, although he was able to contribute twenty dollars, having worked through the summer after graduation as a clerical assistant at the Everett Mill in Lawrence. In later years, Frost recalled with some consternation the arrangement that he had with his grandfather: “Since he paid me five dollars a week for my keep, it was only natural, from his viewpoint, that he should desire a return on his investment, usury. He had the New England shrewdness which demanded a dollar back with interest. Now, in as much as I got my room for $30 a year, meals proportionately reasonable, the five dollars was plenty for ordinary needs. What made it bad was the fact that he insisted on an itemized account for every penny spent, where it went, and what it was for. I rebelled and wanted to tell him to go to hell. But I didn’t. I held. It wasn’t that I objected to being dependent on him. That sort of thing has never bothered me.… It was just that I hated to keep an account of every little dab I spent.”16

To the end of his life, Frost was casual with money and refused to worry about small amounts. His early memory of accounting to his grandparents for every penny would, in the middle of the 1930s, yield a little aphoristic poem, “The Hardship of Accounting.”

Never ask of money spent

Where the spender thinks it went.

Nobody was ever meant

To remember or invent

What he did with every cent.

Perhaps because he was so casual with money, and never knew how much was coming in or going out, Frost spent a good deal of time fretting in later years about his income, and often had the feeling that there was never quite enough, that he must concoct a plan to get more.

The summer of 1892 had been an idyllic one for Frost. The job at the mill was light (or decidedly undemanding), and he was able to spend most evenings and weekends with Elinor. His grandfather had a small rowboat, and he would take her on short voyages up the Merrimack River, stopping at the Lawrence dam, where secluded areas for picnics could easily be found. These outings were, however, often spoiled by Frost’s efforts at lovemaking—a subject he later approached in “The Subverted Flower,” which Elinor would not let him publish during her lifetime. In this tense, compulsively rhythmical narrative, a teenage boy and girl contend with strong, almost overwhelming impulses:

She drew back; he was calm:

“It is this that had the power.”

And he lashed his open palm

With the tender-headed flower.

He smiled for her to smile,

But she was either blind

Or willfully unkind.

He eyed her for a while

For a woman and a puzzle.

He flicked and flung the flower,

And another sort of smile

Caught up like fingertips

The corners of his lips

And cracked his ragged muzzle.

The girl, like Elinor, kept resisting him, afraid of “The demon of pursuit / That slumbers in a brute.” The couple is finally caught, as it were, in flagrante, by the girl’s mother, who “wiped the foam” from her daughter’s chin, then “drew her backward home.” The cumulative effect of the poem is withering, with its three-beat insistent rhythm and heavily enjambed lines, which spill forward compulsively, checked only by the rhymes, which build to a strong crescendo in the poem’s closing triplet.

Frost reluctantly saw Elinor off to St. Lawrence, then journeyed by train into New Hampshire. Hanover, then as now, was difficult to get to; one took a train to White River Junction, Vermont, then switched for a commuter train to the Lewiston Station, in Norwich; from there, one hiked to the nearby Connecticut River (which divides New Hampshire from Vermont) and crossed at the Ledyard Bridge. It was then a steep climb up Wheelock Street to the Hanover green, where Dartmouth Hall stood magnificently on a slight hillock, its wooden facade painted white. The town itself was famous for its tall elms, which continued to shade the village until the late 1970s, when Dutch elm disease killed most of these long-necked, elegant trees.

High on the plain of Hanover, one had a sense of being thrillingly isolated. Vox clamantis in deserto was the Dartmouth motto—a voice crying in the wilderness, and it was indeed a wilderness of sorts, even academically. Frost had been expecting more. He moved into a small room in Wentworth Hall, one of only four freshmen in that dormitory this semester, and soon found himself the object of hazing. It was part of the Dartmouth tradition that sophomores made life as difficult as possible for freshmen during their first term by playing all manner of practical jokes on them. Frost was by no means a stick-in-the-mud, and he enjoyed the horseplay that went along with hazing, but he also considered it childish. He would often retreat to the library, where he buried himself in Homer for a course he was taking from George D. Lord, an assistant professor whose learning he admired.

He was also taking a course in Latin prose, focused on Livy’s history of Rome and taught by a shy young instructor, Charles H. Gould, whom Frost did not especially like. (Gould’s introversion was such that the class ran him rather than the other way around.) His only other course was in mathematics—a subject that interested him in principle, although his professor, Thomas W. D. Worthen, was keener on maintaining discipline than teaching his subject.

Frost found it difficult to study, given the students’ focus on what amounted to war games between freshmen and sophomores. A game much like “capture the flag” dominated the campus one weekend; the object of the exercise was for freshmen to try to steal the sophomore pennant. With his natural agility and strength, as well as his experience as a high school football player, Frost excelled in this exercise. On one memorable occasion he was himself among the small band of freshmen who grabbed the pennant and ran away with it.

Frost did not take to fraternity life, which was central at Dartmouth. “I was invited into a fraternity—Theta Delta Chi—and joined up,” he recalled. “One of my ‘rich’ classmates paid my initiation fee. But somehow I was no fraternity brother.” His room in Wentworth was famously untidy: “The rooms in Wentworth were heated by coal stoves, and I never emptied my ashes—just let them pile up on the floor till they reached the door. My mother had to send up my high school friend, Carl Burell, to dig me out.” His closest friend among the Dartmouth undergraduates was Preston Shirley—a “frail boy and always a sufferer from ailments, he was the life of the place in many ways.” They would talk for hours about “religion, politics, and history.”17

Always a great walker, Frost took to going by himself (or with Preston Shirley) on hikes along the Connecticut River, usually heading north toward Lyme. He would occasionally take a carriage along a dirt road up to Etna, where he could find a mountain trail. Sometimes he went into the woods alone at night, a habit that deeply puzzled his fraternity brothers, who sent a delegation to his room in Wentworth one day to ask what on earth he did on those walks in the woods. “I gnaw bark,” he told them.

In the college bookstore, he bought a copy of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, and he began his first systematic study of English poetry. In the library, he encountered a copy of a magazine called the Independent, which, on November 17, ran on its front page a poem called “Seaward” by the Dartmouth poet Richard Hovey.18 Frost later said, “This was the first time I realized you could publish a poem in a national journal.” It was natural for him, when, a year later, he finally had a poem he thought worth publishing on this scale, called “My Butterfly,” to send it to that magazine.

Frost’s literary activity at Dartmouth was limited, as he later remembered:

It is strange that there is so little to say for my literary life at Dartmouth. I was writing a good deal there. I have ways of knowing that I was as much preoccupied with poetry then as now. “My Butterfly” in A Boy’s Will [his first book] belongs to those days, though it was not published in The Independent until a year or two later. So also “Now Close the Windows” in the same book. I still like as well as anything I ever wrote the eight lines in [“My Butterfly”] which begin: “The grey grass is scarce dappled with the snow.” But beyond a poem or two of my own, I have no distinctly literary recollections of the period that are not chiefly interesting for their unaccountability. I remember a line of Shelley’s (“Where music and moonlight and feeling are one”) quoted by Prof. C. F. Richardson in a swift talk on reading, a poem on Lake Memphremagog by Smollet in the Lit Course, and an elegy on the death of T. W. Parsons by Hovey in The Independent. I doubt if Hovey’s poem was one of his best. I have not seen it from that day to this, but I will swear that it talks of “horns of elfland faintly blowing.” So the memory of the past resolves itself into a few bright starpoints set in darkness. (The sense of the present is diffused like daylight.) Nothing of mine ever appeared in Dartmouth publications.19

Most of the writing Frost did at Dartmouth actually consisted of long, confessional letters to Elinor at St. Lawrence University, where it seemed to him that she was settling in too comfortably. He had hoped that the distance between them would create misery, and that this would spill over into her letters. Now her apparent satisfaction with college life fueled his anxieties and frustrations, and soon he found himself utterly disinclined to study Homer or Plato or Livy. Examinations loomed as the Thanksgiving recess drew to a close, and—much to his mother’s displeasure—he decided to withdraw from school.

The situation at home was such that he had a good rationale. Belle had been having a difficult time with her class in Methuen—“discipline problems,” she called them. Frost determined to help her by taking over the class and whipping the students into shape. “I was glad to seize the excuse (to myself) that my mother needed me in her school,” he said, “to take care of some big, brutal boys she could not manage.”

Preston Shirley helped him carry his trunk down two flights of stairs at Wentworth, and Frost unceremoniously fled from Dartmouth. “I wasn’t suited for the place,” he later said. He was by nature an autodidact, which meant he intensely disliked being told what to read and when to read it. He preferred to go his own way, despite what his family or friends might think or say. “We go to college,” he said, “to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven’t learned in High School. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.”20