5

A FARM IN DERRY
1901–1905

To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. Poems growing out of this, though composite, were built on incidents and are therefore autobiographical. There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.

—FROST TO LOUIS MERTINS

The years spent at the farm in Derry, roughly from the fall of 1900 until the house was sold in November 1911, might be thought of as a chrysalis in which the young poet could mature. By the time he emerged at the end of this decade of farming, writing, and teaching, he would be fully formed: a major modern poet who had found his voice. Many of his best poems were written in these years, too, forming the bulk of his first two volumes, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston. In fact, later volumes—right up through A Witness Tree (1942)—would be seeded with poems (often in rough-draft form) composed during this fertile period. To the end of his life, he would draw on imagery and incidents from this time.

One of the unexpected boons of the Derry years was a small group of friends who would mean a great deal to him in retrospect. This aspect of life in Derry, Frost later admitted, in his poem “New Hampshire,” had come as a surprise:

I hadn’t an illusion in my handbag

About the people being better there

Than those I left behind. I thought they weren’t.

I thought they couldn’t be. And yet they were.

I’d sure had no such friends in Massachusetts

As Hall of Windham, Gay of Atkinson,

Bartlett of Raymond (now of Colorado),

Harris of Derry, and Lynch of Bethlehem.

But these friends did not come easily and quickly to the reclusive and shy Frost, who kept to himself and his family at first.

During these years both Frosts were working to overcome their immense grief over the loss of Elliott. That sort of pain never really goes away; it is simply dulled. But Frost, more than Elinor, was a survivor by nature, and inflexible ambition kept him going, as always. Even so, he did not attempt to publish any poetry during his first six years in Derry. Instead, he devoted himself, despite later rumors (generated by himself) to the contrary, to the daily rituals of farm life.

Carl Burell (and sometimes Carl’s father) worked side by side with Frost, building hen coops, picking apples and pears, tending livestock. Burell’s optimism and energy far outshone that of Frost, who soon came to resent this friend thrust upon him by his grandfather. Burell was a constant reminder that his grandfather did not fully trust his abilities. Nevertheless, the two worked well enough together, and Frost was grateful for the company. Elinor’s silences, now as always, upset him; Burell, on the other hand, was talkative, more so than Frost. The two of them often simply took off into the woods for the day, on what Frost would call a “botanizing walk.”

Frost’s own accounts of farming life, in later years, would emphasize his laziness, as when he told Louis Mertins that his neighbors in Derry “would see me starting out to work at all hours of the morning—approaching noon, to be more explicit. I always liked to sit up all hours of the night planning some inarticulate crime, going out to work when the spirit moved me, something they shook their heads ominously at, with proper prejudice. They would talk among themselves about my lack of energy. I was a failure in their eyes from the start.”1 One must always take care when dealing with this sort of statement from Frost; like all poets, perhaps, he liked to mythologize himself, and had a vested interest in putting forward certain views of himself. The idea that he might have been a reasonably hardworking farmer in these years was not consistent with the persona he had been busily inventing for himself.

Dr. Bricault was still involved in Frost’s venture, handling the marketing end of the poultry business for him with enthusiasm. Almost no farmers were making a good living in New Hampshire at the turn of the century, and Frost did not do badly, given that the soil was poor, the winters harsh, and the economy stagnant. His modest enterprise was subsistence farming, with eggs and apples supplying enough cash to meet the needs of his family. “I was a poor farmer in those days,” Frost later said, “but rich, too. There was plenty of food, and time, too. Lots of time. I was time-rich.”2

Belle Frost had been hit hard by the death of Elliott, too; she saw its effect on Elinor and Rob and was troubled by their lack of religious faith. Jeanie Frost was among the first visitors to the Derry farm, although she came mostly to scold her brother for failing to pay enough attention to Belle, who was clearly dying. Chastened, Frost went to see his mother at Penacook, driving there in the horse and buggy that he and Burell had just bought in Lawrence for twenty-five dollars—on a further loan from Frost’s grandfather. He was shocked by her condition: she was thoroughly wasted by the cancer, and her voice was barely audible. Leaving Penacook, he knew he would probably never see her again. Indeed, Belle died shortly thereafter, and the funeral oration was given by her Swedenborgian friend John Hayes; she was, he said, “one to whom religion was a way of life.” She was buried in Lawrence between the graves of her husband and Elliott.

That Frost was struggling to keep his chin above water is evident from “Despair,” written at this time but never included by him in a volume because of its self-pitying stance. The poem turns oppressively self-accusatory at the end:

I am like a dead diver in this place.

I was alive here too one desperate space,

And near prayer in the one whom I invoked.

I tore the muscles from my limbs and choked.

My sudden struggle may have dragged down some

White lily from the air—and now the fishes come.3

Another early poem, probably written in the spring of 1900, was “Mowing,” which Frost told Sidney Cox he considered the best poem in A Boy’s Will.4 He called it a “talk song,” and it catches in uncanny ways the sound of the speaking voice, although there is nothing casual about it. Frost has made sure to lace the voice tightly to the frame of a sonnet format:

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

The poem shows Frost in complete mastery of the sonnet form, and free enough to move away from any obvious, conventional patterns of rhyming. Rhythmically, the poem mimics the action of mowing, beginning with a double anapest in the first line, which quickly falls into a straightforward iambic foot. The second line might be called “sprung rhythm,” to use Gerard Manley Hopkins’s term for irregular meters. Essentially, Frost (like Hopkins) counts only the strong beats in the line:

And thát was my lóng scythe whíspering to the gróund.

This line, whose near twin had already been used in “The Tuft of Flowers” (“And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground”), is typical of Frost at his best: the rhythm comes perilously close to prose, but is lifted just enough so that it stays inside the boundary lines of verse. One can hear the poet talking here: the rough-hewn New England accent not tripping along or lunging from stress to stress but giving almost equal weight to each vowel sound. In later years, Frost would frequently refer to what he called “the sound of sense,” as in a letter to John Bartlett from England in 1913: “The sound of sense. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound—pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist.” He claimed that “an ear and an appetite for these sounds of sense is the first qualification of a writer, be it of prose or verse. But if one is to be a poet he must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.”5

This is the essence of Frost’s theory of poetry: the writer has to contend with the abstract possibility of the line. (In iambic pentameter, for instance, he deals with five feet in each line of verse, each foot comprising one unstressed and one stressed beat.) Every line of “Mowing,” therefore, is written with a covert feeling for the abstract line: dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum, dee-dum. But spoken English does not comfortably or naturally fit a rigid line, or rarely does. Only one line—“(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake”—comes even close to lockstep iambic pentameter, and even there one has to pretend that “pale” and “green” are unstressed, which is clearly not the case. The poetry, in Frost as in most good poets, occurs in the difference between the abstract possibility of the line and its vernacular performance, where stresses fall as they do normally in human speech. Without that slight tug toward the formally perfect line, however remote, there would be no poetry. The form, indeed, makes the poetry possible.

“Mowing” is, like all of Frost’s work, playful in the extreme. Frost would have been aware that “mowing” was also a traditional euphemism for lovemaking, thus giving a distantly erotic echo to the last phrase: “and left the hay to make.” More to the point, he was writing about physical labor, one of the few poets in the language to make good poems out of real work. But this work is endlessly compromised by the poet’s inner voice, which keeps wanting to create meaning out of what is inherently meaningless: the rhythmical sway of the scythe as it mows down the high grass. The poem is, as much as anything, about the impulse to impose meaning, this peculiar urge to talk about “fay or elf,” when there is really nothing so fantastic at hand. Frost commented on this line years later, at Bread Loaf, saying that “poetry is not getting up fanciful things.”6

In the same talk, he said that “a definition of poetry” was to be found in the line “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” One interpretation of this line might be that the imagination of the actual is superior to “made up” things. William H. Pritchard, wisely, points us in the direction of Emerson to understand the last two lines of the poem.7 Emerson, in Nature (1836), wrote:

Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put. He acts it as life, before he apprehends it as truth.

The tone of the above passage is buoyantly Emersonian, not skeptically Frostian, but the last line might be seen as a gloss on “Mowing.” One must inhabit the factuality of life, embrace it, then slowly come to understand its ideality, its loftier “truth.” The “work of knowing” (as Richard Poirier puts it)8 is, always, a mysterious process; one plunges in, gets to work, and slowly comes to understand some aspect of life. “Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak / To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows”: the imagination must not override or outdistance the truth (by which Frost refers to the reality of everyday experience) but come into its orbit, its ambience; the imagination of reality is the essential poetic act, not reality versus the imagination.

The poem is endlessly complex, as Katherine Kearns has suggested. It is “earnest love,” she notes, that “laid the swale in rows,” thus “biting off the spikes of orchises and scaring the bright green snake.” She suggests that a love that “leaves the hay to make also lays bare the potential simultaneity of desire and of pain as the long scythe whispers to the ground,” adding that “it cannot be entirely accidental that Frost chose the spiked orchis (órchis is the Greek word for ‘testicle’) to be sliced by the loving scythe or that, coupled as it is with the startled snake, the flower, so earnestly loved, becomes sexualized, in one moment uncovered and eradicated.”9

The poem is appealing on so many levels. There is first the lovely sound of the poem, with its countless internal rhymes and half rhymes: note how the word “sound” in the first line, for example, is picked up as the end rhyme of the second line. There is the subtle alliteration: the “w” sound, for example, that goes from “wood” to “one” in the first line to “was” and “whispering” in the second line to “What was” and “whispered” in the third line—thus giving a remarkable sense of motion to the poem. Beyond this, there is the literal description of the act of mowing, rendered in concrete detail, simply, without the slightest affectation, as the poem gathers around a single, deep image: that of a man mowing. Finally, there are the metaphorical levels, the endlessly suggestive layers of meaning that make this a poem about writing, a poem about the process of knowing, a poem about the sexual act and what it means, and a poem about the elusive relations that exist between “fact” and “truth” and the role of the imagination in this interaction.

Frost was not writing poems openly now. He was farming openly, and did not want his neighbors—or even Carl Burell—to know about his poetry. Once in 1901 he did send out a small packet of new poems to Susan Hayes Ward (“The Quest of the Orchis” was sent out and accepted in January 1901). But there were no more packets of poetry for five years after this. Frost was buried deep in daily life and in wide reading, which included a careful rereading of Walden—urged upon him by Burell. This classic of American autobiography seemed to speak to him directly: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” This passage from Thoreau, which Frost often quoted in later years, must have echoed in his head. He was himself engaged upon a deliberate act of living, fronting the essential facts of his life.

In the summer of 1901, his first summer on the Derry farm, his grandfather died unexpectedly in his sleep. In his will, the good feelings he harbored toward his grandson were made explicit; Frost was left five hundred dollars per annum for ten years, then eight hundred per annum in subsequent years, assuming the trust set up for Frost and Jeanie held out. The farm would become entirely Frost’s property in 1911, and until that time he would be able to live without paying rent. All promissory notes (Frost had borrowed endlessly from him, of course) were torn up. The young man was hardly set up for life, but he was now assured a certain minimal income. The fact is that few of his neighbors had an income of five hundred dollars each year; by comparison, the Frosts were well off.

Frost felt oddly liberated after the death of his grandfather and his mother. He was now genuinely on his own for the first time. While the pain of Elliott’s death had not disappeared, and never would, Frost (and to a lesser extent Elinor) had come to terms with this loss. Lesley was well, and was giving great pleasure to her parents. The only remaining impediment to complete freedom was Carl Burell, who still hovered over Frost and seemed to disapprove of his late rising. Now that Frost had a separate income, the tensions between them became more acute. Burell was forced to supplement his own income by taking on projects for the local road commissioner: digging culverts, building wooden bridges, cutting brush. On several occasions, Frost implied that Burell was neglecting his work on the farm, and this led to even greater tension between them.

Burell’s father had been desperately ill during the winter, and he died in March 1902. Burell left soon after, and the local paper recorded his departure warmly: “Mr. Carl Burell, who has lived for some time past on the Magoon place, has decided to leave there and will go to Suncook where he has made an engagement in the Osgood mills for Mr. Bailey. Mr. Burell has won the highest esteem and respect of the people here and we are sorry to have him leave the place.”10 That Frost and Burell parted on reasonably good terms is attested to by an invitation from Burell to “go botanizing” with him in Suncook only a short while later.

After the departure of Burell, Frost occasionally found himself frightened by night sounds in the house. He was suddenly alone, in charge, and felt the responsibility of his new situation gravely. It is likely that “Storm Fear,” a particularly fine poem, was written about this time (though much revised nearly a decade later). The flexible line lengths and the oddly spaced rhymes contribute greatly to the poem’s unusual sound effects:

When the wind works against us in the dark,

And pelts with snow

The lower chamber window on the east,

And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,

The beast,

“Come out! Come out!”—

It costs no inward struggle not to go,

Ah, no!

I count our strength,

Two and a child,

Those of us not asleep subdued to mark

How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—

How drifts are piled,

Dooryard and road ungraded,

Till even the comforting barn grows far away,

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether ’tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.

The brilliance of that first line owes something to its alliterative progress: “When the wind works against us in the dark.” As usual, the speaking voice is broken against the abstract possibilities of an iambic, five-foot line. But all expectations are reversed in the second, two-beat line, which swings with harsh enjambment into the simple, more conventionally iambic, third line. The poem personifies the weather itself, turning it into a beast: typically for Frost, the narrator is terrified of the elements, eager to retreat into the warmth of the hearth. This is a depressive’s poem, to be sure: a poem, like so many of his poems, about the threat of exposure and fear of nature. The last three lines leave little doubt that the speaker wonders if, indeed, he can survive the onslaught of the storm or summon the will to continue. It may take some external aid (God, Carl Burell, luck) to save the “us” into which the poet-narrator has withdrawn: the “two and a child” that presumably refers to himself, Elinor, and Lesley.

As usual in Frost, the poem moves subtly beyond the physical circumstances of the poem, reaching toward a level that could be called metaphysical. The loneliness is more than simple isolation in a farmhouse during a snowstorm. There is real fear as one moves from “Two and a child” to “How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length”—a line which, by its metrical length and rhythmical extension, seems to exhaust the heat that might be needed for survival. By the end, it isn’t that we fear that the family in the poem will not be dug out; rather, the fear rises to an existential level, as if the storm were some Miltonic Chaos threatening to absorb the fragile identity of the narrator. One senses that Frost and his family will need some deus ex machina to make it through the dreadful weather, which is “inner” as well as “outer.”

Spring did eventually come, and Frost and his family survived. Elinor had become pregnant in September, and she delivered Frost another son, Carol, on May 22. The following October she was pregnant again, and the child was expected in June. Aware that Elinor was highly anxious about her situation, with young Lesley in tow and a new baby to look after, Frost decided to take the whole family to New York City in March 1903, a move that startled his neighbors, who were already suspicious of Frost. None of them, of course, could ever have afforded such an excursion, had they actually wanted to make it in the first place.

In New York, the Frosts rented for a month a small furnished apartment on Sixth Avenue, and they took Lesley to see the usual sights of the day: the aquarium at the Battery, the zoo in Central Park, the famous Hippodrome. But Frost had other things in mind, too: he wanted to make some literary contacts. While two editors politely entertained him in their offices, he was generally frustrated by his efforts. “The literary world didn’t want to hear from me when I was a farmer in New Hampshire,” he later said. “I had mud on my shoes. They could see the mud, and that didn’t seem right to them for a poet.”11

The family returned to Derry for the birth of Irma on June 27, 1903. With three small children to raise, Frost found himself immersed in the role of paterfamilias, and happily so. One can see from the journals kept by Lesley, and by reports from friends and family, that he felt quite comfortable in the role of farmer-father. “It’s often overlooked that Frost was devoted to his young family, that he played with the children, educated them, thought about their development. He was present on the scene, daily. He took them for walks, put them to bed, sat at the dinner table with them. There was almost nothing else in his life in the Derry years, when the children were young and growing up,” recalls his granddaughter.12

He also became extremely fond of his chickens, devoting himself to their care, taking pride in them—as in “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury,” where he celebrates the success of one particular bird at a contest he attended. That Frost’s imagination was engaged in poultry farming is clear from the eleven brief sketches that he wrote for the Eastern Poultryman and Farm-Poultry (two trade journals) between 1903 and 1905. While none of the stories is particularly good, one can hear in them Frost trying on the idiomatic speech of local people—the speech that would become a staple of his poetry in the years to come.

“Life on the Derry farm was relaxed and varied,” Lesley Lee Francis recalls, looking back through her mother’s childhood diaries. “While there was little money for the extras we take for granted today, by contemporary standards the Frosts enjoyed a happy and healthy existence, one they certainly looked back on with nostalgia. Activities divided up the day: tending to the farm animals (chickens, a cow, and a horse), writing and ‘playing school,’ chasing the cow or a stray bull (or even a stray hunter), going into town to shop (and, on one occasion, to church) with mama or papa, or, in the evenings playing games (dominoes, a civil war game with dice, ‘puss-in-the-corner,’ bobbing for apples) and reading aloud. In one family scene, mama is raking up the yard, papa is cutting with the scythe, and Carol and Irma are sitting on the hay cart, while grandpa (Elinor’s father) is preparing a bonfire. Irregular hours, exacerbated by Frost’s and Elinor’s differing biological clocks—Frost was a late riser, Elinor a morning person—and the at-home school arrangements, permitted a great deal of flexibility in the daily activities.”

Life on the Derry farm was quite comfortable, in fact. “The Frosts did not go hungry,” Francis continues. “We know, from the journals, that meals, prepared by one parent or the other, were haphazard, and not surprisingly were high in dairy products and poultry produced on the farm. They were supplemented by the abundance of nuts, berries, and fruits gathered by family members throughout the year.”13 Breakfasts were hearty: scrambled eggs, homemade bread, fresh cream over fruit from the farm, when fruit was in season. There was always lots of maple syrup, which was poured over pancakes and used to flavor breads. At dinner, usually served midday, they had plenty of meat, with fresh vegetables in summer and canned in winter.

Much has been made by previous biographers of Frost’s ineffectualness as a farmer. It is true that he liked to sleep late, wasn’t especially comfortable around livestock, and got sick quite often, thus having to neglect his chores. There seems to be little doubt that regular bouts of depression weighed him down, making it difficult for him to function well. In spite of this, he did keep a farm for a decade, and enjoyed it. Perhaps more important, he was smart enough to fit himself into a way of life that allowed for the flexibility a writer needs in daily life. “A writer has to cultivate leisure,” Robert Penn Warren once said. “People made much of Frost’s so-called laziness. It was a necessary laziness. It was the way his mind, his imagination, worked; he needed all that time, the spaciousness, the ease of getting from day to day. Poems could root in those spaces. In his case, they did.”14

The Frosts decided to educate their children at home, and since both parents were qualified teachers, the local school board gave them permission to do so. Each weekday, at ten, Elinor called the children into the parlor and sat them on the large blue sofa (which had once belonged to Belle) and began their first lesson of the day. Reading and writing were primary subjects, but elementary mathematics also had a place in the lesson plan. “Taught the alphabet on a typewriter,” Lesley Frost said, “by the age of three [I] was writing, phonetically but legibly, on the machine. By five, I was writing longhand, also legibly, though highly misspelled.… My mother taught the organized subjects, reading (the phonetic method), writing (then known as penmanship), geography, spelling. My father took on botany and astronomy. They both went over our stories for criticism, though it was my mother who scanned them first for spelling and grammar.… Reading was most important.”15 The Frosts subscribed to the Youth’s Companion and St. Nicholas—two popular magazines for children.

Lesley remembered that the children would follow their father into the woods, through the cranberry bog, or along a stream, listening to his tales of goblins and fairies, absorbing his detailed botanical expositions, taking in stories meant to inform them about historical figures and epochs. They were forced to memorize large chunks of English and American poetry, and to learn the names of every plant, weed, bush, tree, and animal that they encountered on their hikes.

When the children and Elinor were asleep, Frost sat at the kitchen table, often well past midnight, writing his poems. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere of the Derry farm permeates the products of those years. It was here, for example, that Frost wrote “Hyla Brook,” one of his finer lyrics. Years later, he recalled to John Haines that the poem was about “the brook on my old farm. It always dried up in summer. The Hyla is a small frog that shouts like jingling bells in the marshes in the spring.”16

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

In many of Frost’s better poems, one finds him musing on his art surreptitiously, keeping the focus elsewhere. “You don’t want to say directly what you can say indirectly,” he once remarked, echoing Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “Tell the truth but tell it slant.” In another poem, “Spring Pools,” he muses on much the same theme: the things we love often seem to disappear on us, but they come up elsewhere. Typically, in “Hyla Brook” Frost begins with a fetching line and ends with a totalizing aphorism; also typically, it is not easy to connect the aphorism to what has apparently gone before. Why should we “love the things we love for what they are,” especially when they have gone underground, have deserted us? There is something willful about this stream, which has “gone groping underground”—not a pretty image. It has ruined the lovely Hyla breed, too, both the frogs and their music.

The poem is, as much as anything, about the source of inspiration, and what one does when it has dried up—literalized here in the stream. The frogs represent song, or poetry: the voice that “shouted in the mist a month ago, / Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow.” That last line, so unexpected and haunting, is Frost to a T: the sort of gorgeous linguistic turn that moves the language into a realm beyond normal discourse. This “otherness” in Frost is also apparent in the odd, penultimate lines that precede the final aphorism: “This as it will be seen is other far / Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.” What can this mean? There is, perhaps, an echo here of Tennyson’s “The Brook,” which Frost knew well. Tennyson wrote, “For men may come and men may go, / But I go on forever.” The brook, as poetic inspiration, goes on forever, though hidden from view. One rarely, if ever, comes upon “other far” or “otherwhere”—colloquialisms that Frost has naturalized as poetic language. These lines seem to suggest that the disappearance of this brook, and its underground life, are quite different from the usual disappearing brook. The very oddness of the language ingeniously guarantees their untranslatability; one cannot even put these lines into standard English without losing something essential to their meaning.

The origins of this poem lay in the happy conjunction of Frost’s firsthand observation of the frogs near his house in Derry and his reading of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, which he numbered among his favorite books. In the relevant passage, Darwin writes:

Nature, in these climes, chooses her vocalists from more humble performers than in Europe. A small frog, of the genus Hyla, sits on a blade of grass about an inch from the surface of the water, and sends forth a pleasing chirp: when several are together they sing in harmony on different notes.17

In Frost’s own developing aesthetic, he “set the hyla against the haughtiness of ‘European performers’ and lauded these ‘humble’ singers performing in a difficult theater,” suggests Robert Faggen.18

The foundation of Frost’s later work was laid in those years in Derry, as his friend Hyde Cox noted. “He had read voraciously at Derry,” Cox said, “the classics, English and European philosophy, history.”19 Frost also groped his way toward a poetics of speech, what he would later call “the sound of sense,” the strange vitality that is caught in living speech. “When I first began to write poetry,” he said, “before the illumination of what possibilities there are in the sound of sense came to me—I was writing largely, though not exclusively, after the patterns of the past.” As a young poet, he began by imitating voices of the past. “The young poet is prone to echo all the pleasing sounds he has heard in his scattered reading. He is apt to look on the musical value of the lines, the metrical perfection, as all that matters. He has not listened for the voice within his mind, speaking the lines and giving them the value of sound.”20

It was in Derry that he began to listen keenly to the people around him, many of them farm laborers, and to catch their way of talking, their “sound postures.” One of these was John Hall, a local poultryman whose speech cadences and casual, country wit fascinated Frost, who also began to cultivate his own conversational style in these years. This style became the bedrock of his own original poetics—a point made recently by Peter J. Stanlis, who argues that Frost’s mastery of conversation played a huge role in his developing style as a poet, providing a key aspect of his aesthetic theory and poetic practice.21 The connection between poetry and conversation dawned on him, according to Frost, when he was talking one day with a friend of William Hayes Ward’s. “I didn’t know until then what it was I was after,” he recalled. “I was after poetry that talked. If my poems were talking poems—if to read one of them you heard a voice—that would be to my liking!”22

*   *   *

While there were some harrowing moments in this period (1902–05), it was also a time of recovery and reconstitution for Frost. The farm work was relatively light, and aided by the annuity from his grandfather, Frost was able to pace himself—a crucial thing for anyone trying to become a poet. He knew few people in the village and had few commitments beyond his immediate family life.

Marjorie was born on March 29, 1905, swelling the brood again. Frost lavished attention on her, as he had on the others in their infancies. That he took parenting seriously, was a devoted and careful father, is not in question. He was also a natural teacher, and he loved introducing his children to the world. As early as 1905, Lesley wrote in her own journal: “papa and i took a long wake [walk].” Indeed, her father would write in a poem called “The Fear” that “Every child should have the memory / Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.” Frost associated walks with talks, as we see in “A Time to Talk.” Lesley Lee Francis recalls: “The wildness and excitement my mother sensed in her father (his genius, she and I would surmise) came out in these long walks, sometimes with all the children, to gather checkerberries or play house or store in the grove, but more often with Lesley alone.”23

Frost’s lively sense of play made him an ideal father in many respects. Lesley said that when the snow fell, the children could be sure that he would eagerly rush them outside to ride a sled or build a snowman. In all seasons there were joyful things to do, and Frost made sure a high-spirited time was had by everyone. In springtime, for instance, the children were taken into the woods to find flowers to bring back to the house, roots and all, for transplanting. There were also bonfires, which Frost constructed with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old pyromaniac. In Lesley’s journal she describes one typical summer outing with her father: “We went over across the road in the little pasture. Papa and I went way out in Noise’s land. We found two little ponds and a watering trough. One of the ponds was where we tried to get some cat-tails last year but they were too far in the water, and have seats in it and a fence around to keep people out. They have a cow path down to the pond and pretty. We found a [shotgun] shell, shot just a little while ago.”

The record of family life as seen in Lesley’s journal stands in ferocious contrast to some later portrayals of these years. Lawrance Thompson, who wasted no opportunity to present Frost as a monster, reports—supposedly quoting from Lesley, two months after her father’s death, in 1963—that Elinor and Frost were fighting one night when she stumbled downstairs into the kitchen. Frost was holding a revolver, and he told Lesley to choose which parent she preferred, since one of them would be dead by morning. If indeed this is true, it suggests a side to Frost darker than most people would imagine. There is no doubt that on occasion he behaved horribly. But even as Thompson describes it, the scene with the gun is not entirely without a human side. “Her mother got up from the table, put her arms around Lesley, pushed her out of the kitchen, led her back to her bed, and sat beside her until the child had cried herself to sleep. In the morning she remembered all the facts and wondered if they had actually happened. Perhaps she had only dreamed them.”24 Perhaps, indeed. Lesley’s daughter Lesley Lee Francis says: “In all the years my mother and I talked about her father, there was never any mention of this scene. And, indeed, she was prone to nightmares, especially in childhood. I don’t doubt that tensions did arise in the family, and that Robert Frost was, at times, moody and difficult; but the idea that he would threaten Elinor with a gun is absurd, and the story runs against the whole tenor of the Derry years, which were quite idyllic, and recalled fondly by the children for decades after. My grandfather was devoted to his wife and children, and always protective. The story just doesn’t ring true.”25 Lillian Frost, Carol’s wife, also roundly dismissed Thompson’s story in her letters, explaining in one that her husband “always said that Lesley was dreaming, that the incident with the gun never happened.”26 If the scene did actually occur, there was obviously no fear on Elinor’s part that anybody was really going to get shot.

Nonetheless, there was a dark side to Frost—hardly anyone who knew him has ever denied as much; in fact, in “Desert Places” Frost himself would write: “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” But Frost was able to make use of these dark places, too, dipping into them—as in “Spring Pools”—“to bring dark foliage on.”

The flowering of the Derry years included such poems as “Ghost House,” “Love and a Question,” “My November Guest,” “Storm Fear,” “A Prayer in Spring,” “Going for Water,” “The Trial by Existence,” “October,” “Pan with Us,” “A Line-Storm Song,” and many others—some of which would emerge, in revised form, decades later. Reading through A Boy’s Will, one begins to assemble a visual and emotional portrait of those years of bucolic isolation, their range of imagery and metaphor. “Ghost House,” for instance, is about an abandoned house (an image that would stay with Frost throughout the decades, as in “Directive”—a poem written in the mid-1940s). Written in 1901, it was inspired by an old cellar hole with a broken chimney standing in it—what remained of a nearby farmhouse after a fire had destroyed it in 1867. “Love and a Question” was inspired by the unexpected visit of a tramp to the Derry farm. Frost offered the man food, blankets, and a place by the woodstove to sleep. When the man was gone, he began to muse on the question of this man’s claims on his and his wife’s resources (which were minimal) and affections. Frost often linked poems in this book, and later ones, to specific incidents from the Derry years, “a time when my eyes and ears were open, very open,” as he said.27

Frost’s characteristic voice did not, as he himself noted, emerge at once. “You may go back to all those early poems of mine in A Boy’s Will, and some that are left out of it. You will find me there using the traditional clichés.”28 The texture of “My Butterfly,” “Waiting,” “Flower-Gathering,” “Rose Pogonias,” “In a Vale,” and other poems written before Derry differ markedly from those that show the influence of having actually lived on the farm and talked to the local people. “Storm Fear,” for instance, exhibits a rugged syntax based on the rhythms of living speech. But it was not until North of Boston that one really began to see and hear the results of the Derry years, those after-echoes and effects that continued for decades, shaping Frost’s vision, giving a grain to his voice.