3

MASKS OF GLOOM
1893–1895

This inflexible ambition trains us best.

—FROST TO WILLIAM HAYES WARD, MARCH 28, 1894

Having left Dartmouth prematurely, Frost found himself uncomfortably adrift, prone to fall into one of those depressive states that would for the rest of his life periodically overwhelm him. Although Belle assured him it was not necessary, she was in genuine trouble with her class of rowdy seventh and eighth graders, many of whom took advantage of her emotional fragility, and Frost insisted on taking over her classroom. Already his strong-willed nature was beginning to show through.

That he was persuasive, as well as determined, is evident from the fact that he managed to convince the Methuen school board to take the unusual step of letting him substitute for his mother that spring. (She, meanwhile, was given a class of younger, more pliant, children to look after.) Frost bought a rattan cane from a local hardware store and immediately set about taming this unruly classroom. Although he was forced to resort to a kind of violence that would nowadays land a teacher in jail, he succeeded in winning the attention, if not the affection, of his pupils. A report circulated at the Methuen annual town meeting in March 1893 put the matter succinctly: “The Second Grammar school, left vacant by the appointment of Mrs. B. M. Frost as teacher of the second primary, has been assigned to Mr. Robert L. Frost, a student in Dartmouth College. Mr. Frost, although young, bears an unusual record for scholarship and maturity of character and has shown marked success in the management and instruction of a difficult school.”

The school year came to an end with some relief for everyone concerned. Frost knew by now that teaching children was not for him, although he had no idea how else he might earn a living. He boldly proclaimed to Elinor, still at St. Lawrence, that he intended to write poetry, but he understood that poets rarely earned a living from their craft. “People thought I was lazy,” he later admitted. But this seemed not to bother him. He planned to “pursue his own headstrong folly without interference.”1

With Elinor away, Frost hovered around her family. Her sister Ada began to suffer from acute anxiety attacks, and the family was unsure of how to deal with this crisis. She sat in the White family home in Lawrence with the shades of her bedroom windows tightly drawn, complaining about the noise outside. She ate almost nothing and was, through the locked door of her bedroom, often heard sobbing. When she begged to be taken to the country that summer for peace of mind, Mrs. White found a place for the family on Canobie Lake in Salem, New Hampshire. She asked Rob to come along as general caretaker, largely because her husband refused to accompany them.

Elinor was summoned home from St. Lawrence before the term was finished, on the theory that her presence would help calm Ada. Frost was delighted to have her back, and in mid-April the four of them moved into a large house called the Saunders Place, a four-bedroom dwelling with a stone fireplace, green shingles, and a broad plank porch that overlooked the lake. A short while later, they were unexpectedly joined by Leona, the eldest of the White sisters, who was heavily pregnant and in flight from her abusive husband, a farmer called Nathaniel Harvey, who lived in Epping, New Hampshire. Thus was Frost surrounded by the female members of the White clan, who relied on him for everything from counsel to elbow grease.

The courtship between Elinor and Rob continued, fueled by propinquity. He insisted that their “secret marriage” be made public, but she refused. It was not a “real” marriage, she said. If this were so, he suggested, they should get married in the usual public fashion, with a proper wedding. Elinor resisted, saying that he should think first about how he proposed to support her and a family. She urged him to consider returning to Dartmouth in the fall, but he insisted that this was out of the question. The main thing he had learned at Dartmouth was that education did not necessarily happen in a classroom, he told her. He would educate himself, in his own way and his own time.

By the end of the summer, Leona had gone back to Nathaniel Harvey, who had come to the lake begging forgiveness, and Ada seemed much better. Mrs. White insisted, quite rightly, that Elinor return to St. Lawrence, where she had proved herself a gifted student. Frost was left alone in the house by the lake. The solitude and his emotional situation were conducive to writing. In late August 1893, he wrote “Bereft,” although it was not published until 1927:

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?

What would it take my standing there for,

Holding open a restive door,

Looking down hill to a frothy shore?

In a mood of wonderfully youthful paranoia, which is carried through the poem, the poet-narrator believes that “Something sinister in the tone” of the wind suggests that his “secret must be known.” The poem concludes with a cumulative force typical of Frost at his best:

Word I was in the house alone

Somehow must have gotten abroad,

Word I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.

The poem shows Frost beginning to find a distinct voice well before his twentieth birthday. It also reveals the delicate, precarious state of his late-adolescent consciousness: he felt that he was alone, and that only God offered any comfort or company. With youthful narcissism, he imagined the whole of nature responding to his frenzied emotional state: the wind, the leaves that whirled against him, “got up in a coil and hissed, / Blindly struck at my knee and missed.”

Frost did not need a concrete reason for anxiety and depression, but it was useful to pin these states on something. He had a reason for being upset in late August, when he got a telegram telling him that his grandmother had unexpectedly died in her sleep. Although they had never been close, the elder Mrs. Frost had urged her husband to support Rob financially at Dartmouth, and she had appreciated her grandson’s artistic leanings. Her hope was that her grandson would be able to accomplish things her son had not. Frost intuited her support and concern, and her death hit him surprisingly hard.2

He returned to Lawrence in September, moving back into his mother and sister’s shabby, four-room apartment at 96 Tremont Street. He had no plans for the future; indeed, the extent of his dislocation is suggested by his answering an ad in a Boston newspaper for someone to “manage” a Shakespearean actor. Fired with enthusiasm, he went immediately by train into Boston to meet the actor, who was many years his senior. Pretending to have experience as a theatrical manager, he crossed the Charles River into Cambridge to enlist the help of William James Rolfe, a venerable scholar of English Renaissance literature at Harvard; he also called for assistance on Richard Clapp, a well-known theater critic for the Boston Evening Transcript. Having rented a hall in Boston for a showcase performance, he somehow managed to talk both men into attending. The actor, unfortunately, proved stilted and dull, as both Clapp and Professor Rolfe explained to Frost on their way out. Frost agreed, and decided to cut his losses. His career as impresario quickly ended.

Desperate for cash, he found a job at the Arlington Woolen Mill as a light trimmer in the dynamo room. His job was to replace the carbon in the arc lamps, as needed; this meant climbing tall ladders and balancing in precarious positions. When the work was slow, he would hide on the roof, where he’d read Shakespeare, often in the company of an old high school friend, Edward Gilbert. Decades later, he wrote to Gilbert: “I don’t suppose we think those days in the mill ever hurt or hindered us a mite. I often speak of them not to say brag of them when I want to set up as an authority on what kind of people work with their hands, what they earn, or used to earn, what becomes of them.” He could recall vividly “the bulb throwing and the talks over in your quiet dynamo room” as well as “the carbon dust and the ladders we slid on one leg ahead of us along the well-oiled floors.” Frost learned a lot, he said, but never how to “stand over going machinery on the top step of a step-ladder with nothing to hold on to or brace a shin against and unsling an arc lamp from the ceiling for repairs.”3

In the evenings, he devoted himself to his poetry, and it was during the fall of that year, at home, that “My Butterfly” was composed, based on a fragment he had written four years earlier and inspired by a time at Dartmouth when he found some butterfly wings amid some dead leaves. Frost later called it his “first real poem.” “I wrote it all in one go in the kitchen of our house on Tremont Street,” he said.4 “I locked the door and all the time I was working, Jeanie my sister tried to batter it down and get in.”

This story obviously made a sharp impression, since Frost repeated it often. There was clearly a sense of having to protect himself from the onslaught of the family—as well as the psychological pressure represented by Jeanie, whose mental state (bordering on schizophrenia) was deeply threatening. He was already aware of those dark tendencies within himself, and he was doing whatever he could to ward them off. Poetry quickly became, for him, “a momentary stay against confusion.” Nevertheless, he had to battle for those momentary stays, and they would never come easy.

As he wrote “My Butterfly,” he had a profound sense that “something was happening. It was like cutting along a nerve.” He later famously observed that a poem should “ride on its own melting,” and this poem did. The second stanza, in particular, felt like his first breakthrough into a voice of his own (even though he was still a long way from discovering the style of the more mature work, the essential Frostian note):

The gray grass is scarce dappled with the snow;

Its two banks have not shut upon the river;

But it is long ago—

It seems forever—

Since first I saw thee glance,

With all thy dazzling other ones,

In airy dalliance,

Precipitate in love,

Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,

Like a limp rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

Frost was elated when the poem was accepted by William Hayes Ward, editor of the Independent, a respectable national journal. His correspondence with Ward suggests the unusual degree of self-confidence building up in the young poet. When questioned about his education, he replied: “If you mean what might be called the legitimate education I have received when you speak of ‘training’ and ‘line of study,’ I hope that the quality of my poem would seem to account for far more of this than I have really had. I am only graduated of a public high school. Besides this, a while ago, I was at Dartmouth College for a few months until recalled by necessity. But this inflexible ambition trains us best, and to love poetry is to study it. Specifically speaking, the few rules I know in this art are my own afterthoughts, or else directly formulated from the masterpieces I reread.”5 The gravity and expressive force of a major poet are already audible here, especially when he declares that “inflexible ambition trains us best.” A kind of all-consuming artistic ambition was, indeed, Frost’s own, and part of his genius. He had set his eyes firmly on the path of poetry, and nothing would distract him.

Ward’s sister, Susan Hayes Ward, was the managing editor of the journal, and she and Frost began to correspond about the technical aspects of poetry. In these letters, one sees that Frost had certainly been thinking seriously about literary matters. He explained that he had been reading extensively:

When I am well I read a great deal and like a nearsighted person follow the text closely. I read novels in the hope of strengthening my executive faculties.… Thomas Hardy has taught me the good use of a few words and, referring still to me, “struck the simple solemn.” And as opposed to this man, Scott and Stevenson inspire me, by their prose, with the thought that we Scotchmen are bound to be romanticists—poets. Then as for poems my favorites are and have been these: Keats’ “Hyperion,” Shelley’s “Prometheus,” Tennyson’s “Morte D’Arthur,” and Browning’s “Saul”—all of them about the giants. Besides these I am fond of the whole collection of Palgrave’s.6

He goes on to say that he is studying Greek, with the hopes of being able to read Homer comfortably one day. All of this suggests that Frost had set himself a program of advancement and was not just dreaming. He knew that “to love poetry is to study it,” and he had no fear of concentrated work. “My Butterfly” is not one of Frost’s best poems, but the clarity and emotional focus that are the source of his originality suffuse its lines. This was recognized at once by one of Frost’s earliest readers, the novelist Maurice Thompson, who was sent the poem for comment by Dr. Ward; he noted that “it has some secret of genius between the lines, an appeal to sympathy lying deep in one’s sources of tenderness; and moreover its art is singular and biting, even where the faulty places are almost obtruded. My wife read it aloud to me the other evening when my eyes ached after too hard a day’s work; and it made me ashamed I could feel discouraged when I thought of the probable disappointment in store for young Frost all his life long.”7

This “probable disappointment” was, of course, bedded in the profession of poetry itself, in what T. S. Eliot in “East Coker” characterized as this “raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating / In the general mess of imprecision of feeling.” There may also have been an intuition of the young poet’s idealism, which was bound to be thwarted as he attempted to make his way in a world that cares nothing for poetry.

The job at the mill did not last. One day he arrived late, having overslept, and found the doors locked. “You can’t do this to me!” he shouted through the iron grill, to the glowering foreman.8 The situation was especially traumatic because Belle Frost had recently been relieved of all teaching duties; the Methuen school board had concluded that she was just too unstable to remain in her post. So Frost was now responsible for keeping the family afloat, by whatever means he could invent.

He tried briefly to follow in his father’s footsteps, writing occasional pieces for the Lawrence Daily American and the weekly Sentinel. Initially, he found the prospect of newspaper work appealing, though he later claimed that it involved “too much prying into other people’s lives.” He abandoned the profession almost before starting it. Soon he paid a call on Clinton Leroy Silver, the head of the Salem, New Hampshire, school board. Several elementary schools lacked teachers, and he was willing to try his hand again at a job he had previously considered disagreeable. Silver found the young man impressive and hired Frost on the spot, at a salary of twenty-four dollars a month; he began teaching in South Salem two days later. This salary equaled what he got at the Arlington Mill, but the hours were far shorter. Moreover, the work of teaching children between the ages of six and twelve was a clear improvement upon his previous teaching situation, where he’d been forced to discipline a pack of unruly adolescents.

Meanwhile, ripples widened from “My Butterfly,” that little stone tossed into the public pond. The Wards seemed delighted by their discovery, and they put Frost in touch with various people, including a Congregationalist minister in Lawrence, the Reverend William E. Wolcott, who responded warmly to the poem and wanted to help the young poet. Frost already knew Wolcott slightly, and he was flattered when this respected member of the community offered to serve as his literary adviser. Frost gave him a sheaf of poems, but Wolcott found nothing in the collection equal to “My Butterfly.” He suggested that Frost try for a more elevated note; his poetry was too close to the speaking voice, he said. Frost listened impatiently. The speaking voice was all he had, and—although none of this was yet articulated—he hoped to write poetry that would adhere to the bones of human speech. Indeed, this was the precise moment when Frost first began to understand the connection between poetry and ordinary speech. It was, indeed, a “moment of epiphany,” as Peter J. Stanlis says. “The discovery that he was after ‘poetry that talked’ was like a religious revelation to him.”9 Frost himself later observed to Louis Mertins, “Perhaps when that preacher friend of Ward’s looked me up shortly after my first poem appeared in the Independent and talked to me about it, something providential was happening to me. I’m sure the old gentleman didn’t have the slightest idea he was having any effect on a very stubborn youngster who thought he knew what he knew. But something he said actually changed the whole course of my writing. It all became purposeful.”10

Despite advice from others, Frost was curiously, almost defiantly, unwilling to accept help from external quarters; he wanted to go it alone, to depend only on himself. He even rejected an offer by his grandfather: the elder Frost offered to support him so that he could write full-time for a year, on the condition that if he did not succeed, he must give up trying to be a poet. Frost argued that he would need twenty years to become a recognized poet, and this proved uncannily accurate. A Boy’s Will, his first collection of poems, would not appear until 1913.

Advice poured in from Susan Hayes Ward as well, beginning a relationship that would last for over twenty years. She insisted that he read Sidney Lanier’s The Science of English Verse, which put forward notions of musicality in poetry that cut against Frost’s grain. The prevailing aesthetic on both sides of the Atlantic favored mellifluous rhythms and a kind of verbal prettiness, as seen in poets like Tennyson, Swinburne, and Dowson in England and Longfellow in America. Miss Ward followed up her letter by sending a copy of Lanier’s Collected Poems, with a preface by her brother. Frost gritted his teeth and replied warmly, thanking her. But this was not his kind of poetry.

Frost had to restrain his irritability, which he acknowledged (to Miss Ward) as a character flaw. But this testiness was increased by his feeling that Elinor was enjoying the company of other young men at St. Lawrence University. He feared the competition, and he wanted Elinor there, beside him, sharing his dreams, becoming a part of his intimate world. He went so far as to try to persuade Mrs. White to bring her daughter home, dropping hints that she might not be associating with the best sort of company while away. He warned Elinor herself about the dangers of her situation, and sent her a fiery poem, never collected in a volume:

The day will come when you will cease to know,

    The heart will cease to tell you; sadder yet,

Tho’ you say o’er and o’er what once you knew,

    You will forget, you will forget.

There is no memory for what is true,

    The heart once silent. Well may you regret,

Cry out upon it, that you have known all

    But to forget, but to forget.

Blame no one but yourself for this, lost soul!

    I fear it would be so that day we met

Long since, and you were changed. And I said then,

    She will forget, she will forget.11

Elinor found the poem more than a little histrionic, protesting that she was no “lost soul.” She made matters worse by mentioning in the same letter the names of various male friends, which sent Frost into a panic. When she returned to Lawrence for the summer, he tried everything he could think of to convince her to marry him at once, but to no avail. She maintained, coolly, that if he managed to establish himself—even in a minimal way—she would marry him after graduation. Frost, for his part, could not hear what she was saying and interpreted her remarks as another rebuff. He was convinced now that she was in love with someone else.

Elinor returned to St. Lawrence, much to Frost’s dismay, in the fall of 1894. Deciding that he must do something dramatic to win back her affections, he had printed in an edition of two copies a small volume that contained “My Butterfly” and four other poems; the slim volume was made of handmade paper and bound in rich, brown pebble leather. Twilight was stamped in gold on the cover. One copy was his, the other hers. At a time when he could ill afford the train fare, he delivered her volume by hand, arriving unannounced on the campus one evening. When she seemed not to understand the symbolic import of this gesture, he grew wild with despair. His state of mind at the time is clarified by the fact that on the way home he destroyed his own precious copy.12

Frost now believed that Elinor had shifted her allegiance to a student at St. Lawrence called Lorenzo Case; furthermore, he imagined that his engagement to Elinor was completely broken. (He carried this conviction into later life, although—according to Elinor—it was without substance.) Back in Lawrence, he received a letter from Elinor that seemed calculated to brush him off. In a fury, he packed a small bag and left home without even a note to his mother.

It was early November, and already the leaves had blown from most of the trees lining the streets in Lawrence; a cold wind from Canada made this one of the chilliest falls in recent history. But Frost sought a place that would mirror his bleak mood exactly, in name as well as character. What came immediately to mind was the Dismal Swamp, which runs along the Virginia–North Carolina border for twenty miles. It had been regarded by poets from Longfellow to Thomas Moore as a place where those who have lost hope run away from the world. Frost could easily see himself as Moore’s young lover “who lost his mind upon the death of the girl he loved, and who, suddenly disappearing from his friends, was never afterwards heard of.”13 Frost took the most direct route possible, heading by train from Lawrence to Boston and New York, where he boarded a steamer to Norfolk, Virginia, and began asking around for directions to the Dismal Swamp.

The swamp was, indeed, a frightening place, full of bogs and quicksand. Lake Drummond, near its center, was a black eye in the forest, full of stumps and reeds. A canal pushed through the muck, and it was used by loggers to carry timber (cypress and juniper) out of the woods, although by the 1890s only engine-driven boats could manage its reedy waters. Briars and honeysuckle, cross vine and other thick-growing plants made the surrounding woods a jungle; water moccasins and rattlesnakes lay concealed underfoot. It was no place for the casual walker—especially one dressed, like Frost, in ordinary street clothes, with a light wool overcoat and city shoes.

Frost pressed on, mostly by foot, toward the village of Deep Creek, then set off blindly into the swamp itself. It is interesting that so many of Frost’s best later poems—“The Wood-Pile” among them—return to the scene of a lone walker in a swamp or dense forest, which rapidly takes on symbolic aspects. Indeed, if Frost can be said to have an archetypal poem, it is one in which the poet sets off, forlorn or despairing, into the wilderness, where he will either lose his soul or find that gnostic spark of revelation. The pattern of setting out into the unknown, of casting free from the bonds of society and family, is there in everything from “The Sound of the Trees” and “Birches” to “Directive.” As in “Traces,” a late, uncollected poem, the forest is regarded as a place where barely controllable emotions are subject to the crucible of wilderness experience:

These woods have been loved in and wept in.

It is not supposed to be known

That of two that came loving together

But one came weeping alone.

Frost had come “weeping alone” in the Dismal Swamp, walking ten miles through tangled briars into the interior as dark settled. “I often think how hard that would have been for Robert,” recalled a friend, years later. “He was always terrified of the dark. I would have to go into the house before him at night, to turn on all the lights. It was a thing left over from boyhood.”14 But something stronger than simple fear was pulling Frost forward; he was desperate. The prospect of losing Elinor to another man was more than he could bear, and he preferred oblivion to the anguish of living day by day without her. This mood inhabits the startling first stanza of “Into My Own,” with which his first book of poems would open:

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

The real perils of his walk into the swamp are difficult to calculate, but Frost would certainly have to have been unlucky to die. Indeed, he did not really have the will to push himself to oblivion; when he encountered a group of rowdy duck hunters, he eagerly joined their party, accepting a lift on their boat back to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and then across Albemarle Sound to Nags Head on the Outer Banks. He tried to hop a freight train home, but after a series of misadventures, he went looking for some relatives in Baltimore. Learning that they had moved to a nearby town, he headed there; when he failed to find them, he was given room and board in exchange for doing odd jobs for a grocer named Williams. A few days later, he was stricken by homesickness and wired his mother for the train fare; his symbolic journey came to an end rather flatly. If he had hoped to prove his independence, he had done just the opposite.

One of the fruits of this strange journey, however, was the poem “Reluctance,” where frustrated hopes are mirrored in a dying landscape. It ends with one of Frost’s most poignant stanzas:

Ah, when to the heart of man

    Was it ever less than treason

To go with the drift of things,

    To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

    Of a love or a season?

Frost was clearly not willing to “yield with a grace to reason,” even though Elinor was not asking him to do this. Nobody overreacted to the young man’s self-dramatizing act of disappearance, though all had been worried. And Frost was grateful for their restraint. He decided to approach his life again methodically, and to win Elinor’s love by establishing himself in the community. The only job he could imagine for himself was that of journalist, so he began to cast about for a position, encouraged by his mother and grandfather.

A family friend, the Swedenborgian pastor John A. Hayes, introduced him to several newspaper editors in Boston, though nothing came of this. Frost himself approached the Lawrence American and was hired, much to his own amazement. “I am a reporter on a local newspaper!” he wrote breathlessly to Susan Ward. But the American proved an uncongenial workplace, and Frost returned to his previous post at the Sentinel—a job that lasted only until mid-March, when he resigned in frustration, convinced he did not have a gift for daily journalism. The need to write something on call made the act of writing seem too much like hard work; furthermore, he felt it would certainly ruin him as a poet. A poet, he would later say, needed “time when nothing was happening, or seemed to be happening.”15

Elinor unexpectedly announced that she was coming home for a visit in the third week of March, and asked Frost to meet her at her family home on Spring Street. He nervously agreed. They met in the kitchen, alone, and had a tremendous row. Frost blew up, saying that she no longer believed in him, and that this failure of belief undermined his attempts to make something of himself. Elinor replied that if he insisted on talking this way he could take his ring back. Boldly, she held out her hand. Almost at once, he pulled the ring off her finger, flung it into the coal stove, and stormed out.

Not quite ready to repeat the Dismal Swamp episode, he dashed to Boston to visit his sister, who had recently been hospitalized for an operation. Eager to vent his fury in conversation, he prowled the Harvard campus in Cambridge, looking up two old friends from high school. When he came home, after three days, he found a Swedenborgian prayer meeting under way at his house, led by Pastor Hayes. His mother, noticing her son at the back of the room, passed him a letter that Elinor had hand-delivered to their door. In it, she apologized for the argument, urging him to return to Spring Street.

He did so, but the reconciliation was not perfect. Nevertheless, she had rescued the ring from the fire. There was no tearful embrace, no declaration of undying love. Frost wanted some sort of emotional catharsis, but Elinor held back. A pattern in their relationship was established that would frustrate them both for years to come. It was as if some invisible wall existed between them, and neither could get through it to the other side; but neither could do without the other. They both realized that their futures—for better or worse—were twined, although nothing was said explicitly about marriage.

Frost explained to Elinor that he did have a plan for making a living. His mother believed it would be possible to start a private school at the elementary school level in Lawrence. Dissatisfaction with local schools ran high, so there was clearly an opportunity at hand. Belle had already begun to move by taking on some private pupils, and Jeanie—as her health permitted—had proved eager to help; Belle was now convinced that if everyone (including Elinor) joined forces with her, they could get a school up and running.

That spring, Frost himself began tutoring students in Latin and mathematics; by the end of May, there was so much enthusiasm in Lawrence for the idea of a new school that twenty children had been signed up for the fall term. Frost wrote encouragingly to Elinor—now on the verge of graduation—that the project was going to happen; he held out the fantasy of them all working side by side in their own school.

Elinor liked the idea, and agreed to join in. Frost wanted her to come back immediately to Lawrence, but she had already made arrangements to spend the summer with her sister Leona, who had once again left her husband. A freelance portraitist, Leona had agreed to paint several children of a wealthy businessman who lived at Ossipee Mountain Park, near Lake Winnipesaukee, in New Hampshire. Elinor, herself gifted as an artist, would assist in any way she could—mostly by keeping the children who were not being painted occupied.

Frost could not bear the thought of spending the summer without Elinor, so he followed the White sisters, renting a room in the home of Henry Home on Ossipee Mountain (now Mount Shaw) in Moultonboro. He spent much of his time tutoring two local boys who were about to enter the Phillips Exeter Academy in the fall. It was a fairly peaceful summer, after so much turmoil, and he loved having Elinor close by, although the vexed nature of their relationship did not change. He complained that she was spending too much time with her sister and ignoring him, and she argued that she had never invited him to Ossipee Mountain in the first place. He would occasionally pass her on a steep mountain path as he hiked into the local village, and they would stop briefly, stare at each other, then pass on. The strange mixture of intimacy and emotional distance that marked these meetings was caught, seventeen years later, in “Meeting and Passing,” a haunting poem from Mountain Interval. The poem begins:

As I went down the hill along the wall

There was a gate I had leaned at for the view

And had just turned from when I first saw you

As you came up the hill. We met. But all

We did that day was mingle great and small

Footprints in summer dust as if we drew

The figure of our being less than two

But more than one as yet.…

At this point, the two lovers were certainly “less than two / But more than one as yet.” Their ultimate union was still tentative—more prospect than reality. A distance still gathered between them, awkwardly, whenever they were alone. It was unsettling.

When Frost returned to Lawrence, he discovered that his mother was still unsure enough about the new school to want her son to try to make some money elsewhere. Elinor and she would teach the children, and Jeanie would assist in whatever way she could. Frost agreed, reluctantly, and signed up for another year at the Salem school where, the previous year, he had taught with considerable success. Once again, he would make twenty-four dollars a month—not a lot, but it would help cover the rent on several rooms in an office building in Lawrence that would house Belle’s school.

The great problem for Elinor was that, despite inward reservations, she had put herself in a situation where not marrying Frost seemed impossible. After all, she had become partners with Belle. Frost fully expected her to marry him before Christmas. On the other hand, her father considered Frost incurably lazy, and therefore a disastrous prospect for his daughter. The young man had shown definite signs of instability: dropping out of Dartmouth, shifting among jobs, throwing temper tantrums. His moodiness was apparent to all who encountered him at this time.

Because of his reservations, Mr. White did not offer a church wedding and made clear that he would refuse even to attend any wedding between Elinor and Robert. But Elinor persisted, encouraged by her mother, and despite her father’s absence, the ceremony took place on December 19, 1895, on an icy day just a week before Christmas. The twenty-one-year-old Frost at last married his high school sweetheart, then twenty-three, in one of the rooms of his mother’s school. Pastor Hayes, the Swedenborgian, officiated. A high school friend recalled the occasion in a piece written for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune: “I gazed at Robert, and couldn’t understand how our happy-go-lucky playmate could change into this solemn young man who replied to the pastor in such serious tones. Congratulations, handshaking, kissing—bewildering! First wedding ever I attended, and I did not like it too well.”16

The union was finally made, although the ambivalence of Elinor and the frustrations of Robert were never quite resolved. The fact remains, however, that Elinor encouraged and loved him, and served as a permanent muse until her death in 1939. The scenes of their courtship were branded on Frost’s unconscious, and would recur frequently in dreams and poems—a perpetual source of inspiration and anxiety.