6

THE ACHE OF MEMORY—PINKERTON AND PLYMOUTH
1906–1911

Why bother to dispute what someone else has affirmed? If you wait a little, you will find something to affirm yourself and so won’t be left out of the game or conversations. Wait for your chance for affirmation.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1910

Frost was never good with money, especially at budgeting; he tended to dislike details of this kind, and he often did not know how much money was in his account. Even with his grandfather’s generous legacy, he was having difficulty paying his bills in Derry. The poultry business was hardly remunerative, however much advice he acquired from Napoleon Guay, his friendly neighbor. They lived, as Elinor later recalled, “on lease, with a line of credit at most of the local merchants.” In January 1906, when the annual check from his grandfather’s estate arrived, Frost carried it eagerly to the bank in Derry Village. The teller studied the check carefully, lifted an eyebrow, then asked with undisguised contempt, “More of your hard-earned money, Mr. Frost?” Frost was humiliated.

At thirty-two, with four young children in tow and the prospect of mounting expenses, Frost began to look around for other ways to earn money, and Pinkerton Academy seemed an obvious place to begin. Founded in 1815 by Scottish Congregationalists, the school was only two miles north of the Frost farm. By chance, he had casually made the acquaintance of several members of the Pinkerton faculty since arriving in Derry half a decade before, so he was not starting out unknown. While visiting Lawrence one day in winter, he ran into William E. Wolcott, pastor of the First Congregational Church and a friend of William Hayes Ward’s. It was an icy day, and they stood talking on Essex Street, with snow falling around them. Frost mentioned in passing that he had an eye on Pinkerton, and Wolcott brightened. He had, he explained, recently given a talk in the school chapel, and he knew well the local Congregationalist minister, Charles Merriam, who was a trustee of the school. He promised to see what he could do.

Wolcott wrote at once to Merriam: “I have been acquainted with Mr. Robert L. Frost for a number of years. I know of my personal knowledge that he is a man of scholarly interests and habits, and I have had testimony from former pupils that he was an efficient and inspiring teacher. I am glad to commend him cordially for any position for which he may apply.”1

Frost, meanwhile, approached the local school board in Derry, hoping that his earlier experience would make him an attractive candidate. He also dropped in on Merriam at the Congregationalist church and found the man surprisingly receptive. Merriam suggested that Frost, as a way of getting acquainted with the local Congregationalist community, read a few poems to the upcoming annual banquet of the Men’s League. Frost explained that he had never before read his work in public, and that he would be too frightened to do so. Merriam persisted, however, and Frost agreed to attend if Merriam himself read the single poem that he wished to have presented that evening.

A few days later he appeared at the church with “The Tuft of Flowers” in manuscript, a poem written a decade before. He may well have guessed that the poem’s last, moralizing couplet would seem especially appropriate in this setting: “Men work together, I told him from the heart, / Whether they work together or apart.” In any case, Merriam liked the poem, and he read it aloud while Frost cowered. The audience seemed to appreciate the poem, and several teachers from Pinkerton approached Frost to congratulate him. For the first time, Frost experienced what would in later years become everyday fare: the adulation of the crowd. One teacher suggested that a part-time position at Pinkerton was a good possibility.

Pinkerton commanded a small hill with a broad, northern view. It had been founded by two Scottish merchants; its catalog at the time made its purpose clear: “The school is a good, safe one for diligent people who have a definite purpose.… Others are not desired.”2 This stern tone was upheld by Pinkerton’s longtime headmaster, the Reverend George Washington Bingham, a tall, white-bearded Congregationalist from Boston who had graduated from Dartmouth in 1843. His spirit of no-nonsense religiosity pervaded the school, and Pinkerton’s faculty had been in his thrall for decades. Yet Bingham was close to retirement now, at seventy-five, and was relinquishing many of his duties—among them the supervision of English studies at the school. There was certainly room for a young teacher who could meet his high standards.

Frost was summoned to the school by Bingham and told, without fuss, that he had made a good impression on Merriam; Bingham offered him a job on the spot, proposing that he assume responsibilities for two sections of sophomore English. Frost would be expected to teach for two hours a day, five days a week, and would be paid ninety-five dollars for the spring term. He was asked to begin immediately, and Bingham explained that the position would be renewed in the fall term if all went reasonably well. Frost did not hesitate to accept.

He began teaching at Pinkerton in early March, walking the two miles from his farm to the village, then up the hill to Pinkerton’s impressive redbrick structure, with its Romanesque arches lending atmosphere to the entrance as one entered beneath a clock tower. Because Frost’s classes began late in the day, he was (to his relief) excused from morning chapel. He would usually leave the school as soon as classes finished.

Frost’s pleasure in his new work, and his generally positive state of mind in the spring of 1906, is reflected in the poems he was writing at this time, such as “A Prayer in Spring,” which opens:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

The poem is rigidly conventional in form, its iambic pentameter almost numbingly regular, with rhyming couplets in quatrains sounding almost too pat; but one hears the Frostian note in that gorgeous sixth line: “Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night.” Frost often used the metaphor of ghostliness, especially when describing things witnessed in an altered or oddly lit condition, as when the orchard is observed by night. Yet one cannot easily swallow the poet’s bid to “make us happy in the happy bees,” which seems to bathe in a weak solution of Tennysonian rhetoric. The poem goes on for two more quatrains, without much else to attract our attention. But the mood is consistently cheerful in a conventional, unproblematic way that seems out of place in Frost.

Full-time teaching at Pinkerton began in the fall. His daily schedule represented, for him, an abrupt departure of routine from poultry farming, where a leisurely pace had been sought and found. Frost taught five English classes and was expected to tutor students in Latin, history, and geometry. He was extremely popular with his classes, and the Debating Club invited him to be its coach. The high point of each day was his meeting with the senior English class (thirteen girls and four boys), where he taught some of his favorite authors: John Bunyan, Thoreau, and the poets of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

Frost adored teaching, in part because he found himself able to overcome his natural shyness in a context where the conventional expectations encouraged self-performance. On a more elemental level, his teaching schedule forced him to get out of bed, to shake off the melancholy that seemed otherwise to bear him down. One simply cannot be self-absorbed in front of students; one has to open up, to share one’s thoughts. Fortunately for Frost, the students at Pinkerton were eager to learn, and he went out of his way to make his classes interesting, although he was not then, nor ever would be, a conventional teacher. He did, however, pay close attention to the writing he assigned, and would not tolerate grammatical mistakes.3 Considerable emphasis was placed on memorization, and students left his classes with a hoard of poems by Wordsworth, Longfellow, Whittier, Browning, Tennyson, and Coleridge in their memories. Long passages from Shakespeare’s plays would also be learned by heart, and the students, under Frost’s direction, put on plays at frequent intervals. These included A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marlow’s Doctor Faustus, Sheridan’s The Rivals, and two plays by Yeats: The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902). The Yeats plays were considered daringly contemporary in 1906, and it was unusual for a young instructor to bring such complex, modern work into the school.

The image we get of Frost at Pinkerton is that of an idiosyncratic but attractive teacher. One student remembered that he usually entered the classroom “at a gallop.” “His hair, cut at home, was blown in all directions by the wind,” she recalled, “and if that weren’t enough, he’d run his fingers through the tousled locks defying any accidental order. His clothes were rumpled and ill-fitting. There were no indications that he made any effort to ‘spruce up’ for the job. In class, unlike the ramrod-straight Miss Parsons who taught Greek or the stiff-collared Art Reynolds who taught history, Frost would slump down in his chair behind his desk, almost disappearing from sight except for his heavy-lidded eyes and bushy brows. In such a position Frost would ‘talk,’ or he might read aloud or let a discussion go its own length. Teachers didn’t know how to ‘take him,’ and students, accustomed to ‘prepared lessons,’ were inclined to think they could take advantage of a teacher who was not strict in the way they knew.”4

While Frost enjoyed the support of the principal and most of his students, he was plagued by several jealous colleagues who considered him an unqualified interloper who should not be meddling in education. One of these was Art Reynolds, mentioned above; a Harvard graduate, he lost no opportunity to commiserate with Frost about his lack of a college degree. This rivalry was fueled by the publication, in the Independent, of “The Trial by Existence” on October 11, 1906. Principal Bingham read the poem at chapel, with much deference to Frost, and congratulatory notes arrived at the school from both Charles Merriam and the secretary of the Board of Trustees, John Chase. Once again, Frost was invited to read a poem before the Men’s League of the First Congregational Church, and he accepted on the condition that, as before, Merriam would read the poem. Especially for this occasion, Frost wrote “The Lost Faith,” a long poem about his regret that the ideals for which the Union soldiers had fought in the Civil War had been forgotten. (It was never collected by Frost in any volume, although it appeared in the March 1, 1907, edition of the Derry News.) It is an embarrassingly conventional poem, with no signs of Frostian originality, but it served Frost well on this occasion—and further heightened the tension between himself and Reynolds.

Not all of Frost’s students found his unconventionality appealing, and one of his detractors scratched on the chalkboard before class one day an insult, referring to Frost as a “hen-man.” Frost examined the handwriting; it matched that of a student whom he already suspected of being hostile to him. After class that day, he told the boy abruptly that he was no longer welcome in his classroom. This led to frantic consultations between Frost and Principal Bingham, who understood Frost’s outrage but worried that if the boy were not allowed into this class, he would have to be expelled. There was nowhere else for him to go. “Then he will have to leave Pinkerton,” Frost said, without hesitation. The boy was thus expelled, and from this time on Frost was respected by colleagues and students alike. They understood that, in the end, Frost meant business, and that he would not be pushed around.

Frost worked extremely hard during his first full-time year of teaching, coaching the sophomore debating team, helping with sports, taking on tasks that most teachers at Pinkerton would not have accepted—all to show his mettle. But hard work turned to overwork, and Frost paid a huge penalty in the spring of 1907, when he came down with a severe case of pneumonia—so severe that his physician was terrified that it might be fatal. He was forced to stay home for two months, March and April, to recuperate, and this of course put a strain on Elinor, who was pregnant again, for the sixth time. She became quite ill herself and was forced to move into the home of a nurse in Derry Village, where she would stay until the child was born, on June 18.

The child, a daughter called Elinor Bettina, died soon after she was born, and Frost blamed himself for having put so much pressure on Elinor to look after him when he was ill. For her part, Elinor did not blame him. She understood that one cannot account for these terrible things. It had become clear to them both, however, that a major change in their circumstances was required—for the sanity of both. They decided to move into the village in the fall.

For six weeks in July and August, during the height of the hay-fever season, Frost took the family to the tiny village of Bethlehem in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where he rented two bedrooms from a man called John Lynch, whose farm was perched on a steep slope with a thrilling westward view into Vermont. The family took their meals at a hotel nearby, owned by Michael Fitzgerald, an exuberant Irishman who made the Frosts feel extremely welcome. It was a healing time, and Frost grew stronger as he took long walks in the woods with the children and, late in the afternoons, played sandlot baseball with a group of local farmhands.

Evenings were spent on the porch of the Lynch house, where everyone gathered to play games and tell stories. Frost hurled himself into this activity, and his storytelling skills were honed on these occasions. He would keep the Lynches up until late at night, talking and recounting stories—many of them going back to his childhood in San Francisco. His talk, “full of hijinks and humbug,” would “bubble and boil past midnight,” Lynch would later recall: a pattern of late-night monologuing that remained a feature of his life till the end.

Susan Hayes Ward visited him during this time in Bethlehem, and Frost wrote to her in November with a fond recollection of his time there: “Our summer was one of the pleasantest we have had for years. But it is almost hard for me to believe in the reality of it now. I have been that way from boyhood. The feeling of time and space is perennially strange to me. I used to lie awake at night imagining the places I had traversed in the day and doubting in simple wonderment that I who was here could possibly have been there and there. I can’t look at my little slope of field here with leaves in the half dead grass, or at the bare trees the birds have left us with, and fully believe there were ever such things as the snug downhill churning room with the view over five ranges of mountains, our talks under the hanging lamp and over the fat blue book, the tea-inspired Mrs. Lynch, baseball, and the blue black [Mount] Lafayette. There is a pang there that makes poetry. I rather like to gloat over it.”5

Frost plunged into teaching with renewed vigor at Pinkerton that fall, taking upon himself the task of curriculum revision, with an emphasis on writing and reading aloud. Although he continued to feel snubbed by several colleagues, there was no denying his effectiveness as a teacher. Henry Morrison, the state superintendent of public instruction, visited his class one day and was mightily impressed. He wrote a report that talked about this “class of boys and girls … listening open-mouthed to the teacher who was talking to them about an English classic … talking to them as he might talk to a group of friends around his own fireside.” Morrison invited Frost to speak to a group of New Hampshire teachers on his teaching methods, and he agreed—with trepidation. Although he was by now a little more accustomed to public speaking, having honed his skills in the classroom, he was hesitant to speak before his peers. He managed to do it, however, focusing his talk on the need for teachers to develop their own minds before they thought about developing the minds of their students. He also said it was important that students be made to feel so dependent on books that without them, ever afterward, they would feel lonely. As for writing, he emphasized the need for putting things in memorable, concrete language.

He himself continued to find memorable language for his experiences. One such occasion came in the summer of 1909, when he and his family camped throughout the worst part of the hay-fever season on Lake Willoughby in northern Vermont. The little town by the lake was dominated by Mount Lafayette, which inspired his poem “The Mountain,” among the most richly descriptive of Frost’s early poems:

The mountain held the town as in a shadow.

I saw so much before I slept there once:

I noticed that I missed stars in the west,

Where its black body cut into the sky.

Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall

Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.

And yet between the town and it I found,

When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,

Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.

“I never invent for poetic expression,” Frost said, “No poet really has to invent, only to record.”6 It was during this camping trip that he met a farmer’s wife, one Mrs. Connolley, whose appalling circumstances and voice are firmly caught in “A Servant to Servants,” although Frost later noted to Edward Lathem that the speaker in this poem was a composite figure created from three different women. Set on Lake Willoughby, presumably in 1909, this portrait of a lonely woman run ragged by her circumstances lies at the heart of North of Boston, and is one with the other fine narrative poems of that volume. It is a poem where Frost deals forthrightly with madness, which had touched his family closely and would continue to haunt him.

In the poem, the speaker describes her insane uncle, who lived at home with his family but within a special “house” within the house, a cage of hickory-wood bars. He apparently destroyed all of his own furniture, and lived like an animal in this cage, naked, carrying a suit of clothes on his arm. He “went mad quite young,” though we never learn exactly what provoked the madness except that he was “crossed in love.… Anyway all he talked about was love.” Another important figure in the poem is the speaker’s mother, brought to this house where “She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night.” Now she, the speaker, has moved to a cabin “ten miles from anywhere,” but on a lake that seems to mirror her continuing discontent. We learn, in passing, that she too had been thought insane, and was put into an asylum. Now she is forced to act as “a servant to servants,” taking care of Len, her husband, and the endless parade of hired men who tramp through. It’s a searing portrait of a mad, stunted, rueful housewife—one of a continuing series of portraits of rural women in distress. These women perpetually claw at their surroundings, hoping to subvert the male strictures (and structures) that bind them, or seem to push them toward insanity.

Slowly but unmistakably, Frost was acquiring a portfolio of poems of the first order, working at tight, small lyrics (often in traditional forms, such as the sonnet) as well as larger, narrative poems that employed a variety of local voices, male and female. He knew it could not be long before he would have enough good material for a collection, although he remained doubtful that a publisher would want to publish what he wrote. On some deep level, he could still not believe he was not just a “hen-man,” as his derisive student at Pinkerton had suggested.

*   *   *

The Frosts returned to Derry in September and, having reluctantly decided to give up the farm, moved into Derry Village itself, where they rented the top floor of a large Victorian house owned by a young, unmarried lawyer, Lester Russell, who quickly became a good friend to the whole family. Indeed, Russell would often have dinner with the Frosts, and would take the older children (who were now placed in local schools) into the nearby woods for walks.

Principal Bingham had retired the previous spring, and the new principal was Ernest L. Silver, a graduate of Dartmouth (Class of 1899). He and Frost were nearly the same age, and had much in common—a love of poetry, an interest in sports, and a belief that good teaching was not necessarily conventional teaching. Ernest was the son of Charles L. Silver, who had twice hired Frost to teach in Salem, years before, so there were many threads to bind these men.

Another important friendship developed between Frost and one of his pupils, John Bartlett, whom he had already known for two years. Bartlett was now captain of the football team, president of his class, and editor of the school newspaper. He was Frost’s prize pupil, and he became a lifelong friend. Much as Frost had done, he later married his high school sweetheart. (Frost took an active part in promoting this relationship, as he would often do in later years with young men whom he considered his protégés.)

In the fall of 1909 Frost published in the school magazine, the Pinkerton Critic, a poem called “A Late Walk.” A version of it had been written in 1897, to Elinor; it is typical of the poems in A Boy’s Will—vaguely romantic, adhering closely to the common measure of Puritan hymns, four beats alternating with three, and rhymed on the second and fourth lines only. Thematically conventional, the poem has a rather wistful tone; but that Frostian note, unmistakable, is present in the first lines:

When I go up through the mowing field,

    The headless aftermath,

Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,

    Half closes the garden path.

Here, Frost has taken his level of diction down, as he said, “even lower than Wordsworth.” As ever, the vividness of the imagery—the dewy field “Smooth-laid like thatch”—is tied to its particularity, the sense of a poet writing about something that he has repeatedly observed himself.

Frost’s career as a teacher blossomed that year, as he took a central role in putting on five plays—a selection designed to illustrate the dramatic conventions of different periods of English literature. John Bartlett, who played Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus, later commented in a letter to Gorham Munson (the poet’s first biographer) that Frost had “turned the school around” with these productions, drawing attention to himself as a teacher in such a manner that nobody could now doubt his seriousness and originality, or rival his energy.

Bartlett later wrote fondly of Frost as a teacher: “A few of the boys spent considerable time with Frost out of school hours. I remember a walk over the turnpike to Manchester in late afternoon, an hour spent in a bookstore, an oyster stew, and then a ride home on the electric railway. Our conversation on walks touched books only now and then. Frost had an interest in everything wholesome, and on a walk of two hours the conversation might include reminiscences of his early life, discussion of school affairs, including athletics, aspects of farm life in New Hampshire, some current news happening of importance, and nearly anything else. If, passing a farmhouse, the aroma of fried doughnuts came out to us, Frost might propose we buy some. Down around the corner, we might encounter a fern he hadn’t seen since last in the Lake Willoughby region. And if darkness overtook us, and it was a favorable time for observation, Rob would be sure to take at least five minutes to study the heavens and attempt to start our astronomical education. Rob always talked a good deal, and his companions did, too. There was always an abundance of conversation, and almost never argument. Rob never argued. He knew what he knew, and never had any interest in arguing about it.”7

Frost’s reputation as a teacher now attracted statewide attention, and he was invited to give two lectures on his classroom methods in the winter of 1910—in Meredith in January and, a month later, at the Farmington Institute, where he talked about the relationship between teaching literature and getting students to write well themselves, always a subject dear to him. For the first time, he was beginning to feel relatively at ease on a platform, and to gain some confidence in expressing his opinions in a public way. He had never, of course, been short of strong opinions, nor unwilling to express himself to those near him, but now the public manner was finally catching up with the private manner.

John Bartlett, in the meanwhile, went off to Middlebury College, in Vermont, where—much as his mentor had done at Dartmouth—he abandoned his academic career rather abruptly, leaving school in the middle of his freshman year. Frost, in a burst of sympathy, rushed to visit his young friend (who was back at home, on a farm in Raymond, not far from Derry), advising him not to worry about the future. He explained that college was not necessarily the best route to an education; indeed, his skepticism about the value of a college degree was intense. The bond between Bartlett and Frost was strengthened when it turned out that pulmonary problems had played a part in Bartlett’s withdrawal.

Frost’s career at Pinkerton ended, rather unexpectedly, in 1910. He was, he said, exhausted by the teaching load, “practically in a coma” from overwork. Adding to his troubles was the suicide of his landlord and friend, Lester Russell, who had been caught diverting funds from a trust he managed to pay off his own gambling debts. The poor fellow drank a bottle of arsenic, then died an agonizing death. The effect on the Frost family was considerable: Carol, in particular, was horribly shaken by the event, and would become obsessed with the idea of suicide—an obsession that worried his parents gravely.

A further disturbance came in July, when Ernest Silver resigned as principal at Pinkerton to take up a similar position at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth, a college for teachers. This dark cloud soon passed, however: Silver insisted that Frost come with him as a member of his faculty. There was, it so happened, no position available in English; the only openings were in psychology and the history of education. But Silver told Frost he could “teach anything he put his mind to.” With some trepidation, Frost agreed to take on these two new assignments, insisting that he would not continue in this job beyond one year.

He had long planned to take a leave of absence from teaching—even quit altogether—when, by the terms of his grandfather’s will, he was permitted to sell the farm in Derry. In 1911, he was at last free to put the property on the market. Unfortunately, he had neglected the farm since taking up the job at Pinkerton, and the place had begun to crumble. “The porch had brokens steps and many windows needed replacing,” Elinor recalled. The garden was now “a terrible jungle.” No buyers came forward, and Frost was forced to sell the mortgage back to a bank in Concord for twelve hundred dollars—considerably below market value. The mixed feelings that accompanied this sale are registered in a poem dating from that spring:

Well-way and be it so,

To the stranger let them go.

Even cheerfully I yield

Pasture or chard, mowing-field,

Yea and wish him all the gain

I required of them in vain.

Yea, and I can yield him house,

Barn, and shed, with rat and mouse

To dispute possession of.

These I can unlearn to love.

Since I cannot help it? Good!

Only be it understood,

It shall be no trespassing

If I come again some spring

In the grey disguise of years,

Seeking ache of memory here.8

Plymouth, a county seat, sits in the foothills of the White Mountains, a small village that, then as now, overlooks a picturesque valley. The Pemigewasset River runs beside it, providing a source of waterpower for several small industries dating back to the late eighteenth century. Because of good railway connections to Boston and Montreal, Plymouth had attracted summer visitors for many decades: indeed, Nathaniel Hawthorne was a great admirer of this “fine, gemlike town in the mountains,” as he called it, and spent his last days there.

Plymouth Normal School had originally been founded as Holmes Academy, in 1808. After more than five decades of service, enrollment fell off and the school languished for nearly a decade. It was reshaped in 1871 as an institution devoted to training women for the teaching profession. Just over a hundred students were enrolled there in 1911, when Frost arrived. The campus consisted of a single brick structure that housed both administrative and faculty offices as well as classrooms; this impressive edifice was surrounded by a dozen clapboard cottages, which were used as dormitories. Plymouth’s moderately prosperous town center was not far away—a single main street bustling with horse-drawn carriages, a redbrick post office, a bank, a dry-goods store, a butcher and greengrocer, and various ancillary shops.

By now, Frost was feeling buoyed by his triumphs at Pinkerton, where he had made a name for himself as a teacher and a responsible citizen. His lectures at various teachers’ conventions had been so well received throughout the state that he was at once accepted by his colleagues at the Normal School as a man who deserved a good deal of respect. The beginnings of the famous public manner were apparent in his self-presentation as a witty, playful, teasing performer in the classroom. “There was something earthy and imperfectly tamed about him,” one student remembered. Another recalled his “original approach to teaching, with a sharp wit and headstrong manner that was so different from any of the other teachers.” Others pointed to his “folksy” style—a self-consciously composed manner that he would perfect in later years. This involved speaking in a clipped style, with homespun imagery and examples, and a Yankee way of seeming to imply more than was actually said. One hears it on tapes of his readings in later years: the dropped endings of certain words, the broad accentuation of certain vowels, the sly, winking quips. In his speech as well as in his poetry, Frost began to favor strong, simple verbs; he used a rough-hewn, flinty language that seemed to reek of the northern New England soil. His clothing, too, was chosen to reinforce this emerging style; he favored unpressed jackets, gray, soft-collared shirts, and heavy boots of the kind farmers normally wore. His hair was now rarely combed.

The unruliness of his personal style was reflected in the content of his lectures as well as in his dress and manner. In his course on education, Frost went directly to such classics as Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Émile. He also insisted that the students read How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (1801), a controversial book by Johann Pestalozzi, a Swiss theorist of education and a school reformer. In the psychology course, Frost focused on William James, as might be expected. Students read his Talks to Teachers on Psychology and Psychology: The Briefer Course—the latter a favorite of Frost’s since he’d encountered it at Harvard.

Frost never gave formal lectures, although a certain passage in a text might provoke a lengthy personal anecdote or commentary—he was growing increasingly fond of his own voice. Though he’d been hired to teach psychology and education, his interest in literature could not be contained, and he would often read aloud to the students from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury or the stories of Mark Twain. Once he read the whole of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, over several days, to a class. Few requirements were placed on the students with regard to written work, although Frost could be demanding in class, forcing students to face their own prejudices directly. “Some of us were made quite uncomfortable by him,” one student recalled, “but we admired him. He was very popular.”

The Frosts had been invited to share a cottage with Ernest Silver, whose wife was an invalid and had not yet joined him in Plymouth. This arrangement led, perhaps inevitably, to problems between Silver and Frost. Elinor’s casual housekeeping and her chaotic approach to meals did not sit well with Silver, a fastidious man with a penchant for order. There was also the matter of the Frost children, whom Silver considered undisciplined, even unruly. He blamed the parents for their behavior, and Frost resented this; he soon began to imagine that Silver had been secretly working against him for some time, even back at Pinkerton—an absurd proposition, given that Silver had gone out of his way to bring Frost to Plymouth in the first place.

It was lucky for Frost that Silver was a patient and diplomatic fellow. He managed to soothe his difficult friend and housemate, and Elinor (to her credit) made an extra effort to conform to Silver’s not unreasonable wish for more order. The children went along with this change of routine, largely because they liked Plymouth much better than Derry Village. The Normal School ran a program for a limited number of children from Plymouth, and all four of the Frost offspring were now happily enrolled there; the children enjoyed having a spacious campus for roaming, lots of opportunities for sports, and the enthusiastic attention of many young teachers in training.

Frost himself liked the facilities, and he avidly took up the game of tennis at this time. One of his opponents on the court was a young teacher in the local high school, Sidney Cox, who was then twenty-two. Cox would later become one of Frost’s closer friends, but—at least in the first month of their relationship—the going was rough. Cox was a young man of considerable seriousness, at times bordering on self-importance. “He was a gentle fellow,” recalled one colleague at Dartmouth (where Cox later taught for many years), “but he had no sense of humor, especially when it came to himself. His feelings could be easily hurt.”9 Sensing an easy target, Frost could not help himself; he teased Cox mercilessly. At one point, Cox asked Ernest Silver if the reason Frost had not yet achieved more in his career was related to “a drinking problem”—a curious assumption, given that Frost drank very little. When Frost heard about this, he could not help but laugh. As he later recalled: “Sidney’s seriousness piqued the mischief in me, and I set myself to take him. He came round all right, but it wasn’t the last time he had to make allowances for me.”10

This friendship soon became central to Frost’s life at Plymouth, and he and Cox began taking long walks together in the surrounding woods and fields; in the evenings Cox often had dinner with the Frosts and then settled into an armchair in the parlor by a log fire for dramatic readings by Frost, who had recently discovered Synge’s Playboy of the Western World, which he admired greatly, and Shaw’s Arms and the Man. Frost also took pleasure in reciting the poetry of W. B. Yeats, from whom he learned a good deal about versification. (Frost and Yeats would meet, a couple of years later, in England. Indeed, in 1913 Frost wrote back home to Sidney Cox: “How slowly but surely Yeats has eclipsed Kipling. I have seen it all happen with my own eyes.”11)

The Yeatsian note in Frost is heard, most vividly, in early poems such as “Love and a Question,” “In Hardwood Groves,” and “October.” The latter, with its taut, formal rhythms and almost Celtic wistfulness, is vividly Yeatsian, especially in the opening four lines:

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

Although written some years earlier, in Derry, it was revised in the fall of 1911 and accepted for publication by the Youth’s Companion in the spring of 1912, during Frost’s last term at Plymouth; the poem “was meant as a kind of prayer,” Frost said.12 Though imitative to a degree, it shows that Frost was wholly in command of this kind of rhetorical exercise, and there are throughout the poem touches that make it unmistakably Frostian, such as the whimsical suggestion to the personified season that it release its leaves at a very slow pace:

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Frost was beginning to feel the full weight of his power—as a poet, and as a force in the world. He was reading widely now, not only in English poetry and drama, but in philosophy. Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, for example, had just been released in translation, and Frost read it eagerly. Just how eagerly this book was being read and discussed by young intellectuals in 1911 is evident from the memoirs of Conrad Aiken, who was Frost’s contemporary. Aiken met T. S. Eliot, a Harvard classmate, at a café in Paris that very autumn and their talk centered on Bergson’s book.13

Bergson was skeptical of abstract intellect, which he regarded as destructive, favoring what he called “creative construction,” a force in the human mind that parallels a vital force in nature, the defining element in what he called “creative evolution.” Life, which he identified with that creative element, is always “striving, rising upward” toward some unnamed pinnacle, and battering against the material world, which—much like a building that the wind must evade—only diverts it, never ultimately blocks it. As a consequence of these views, Bergson praised the imaginative person, such as the poet or prophet, who could rise above the “sterile scientific pretensions of the age,” advocating a “right relationship to the Source,” by which he meant something like God. (George Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah is an undiluted version of Bergsonian thinking.) In his efforts to naturalize supernaturalism, Bergson had great appeal to intellectuals of Frost’s generation, who were trying to shake off religious (and artistic) orthodoxies of all kinds. Hardly a major writer in the early part of the century was not, to some degree, influenced by Bergson.

Bergson was a dualist, after Plato and Plotinus, who ultimately put his faith in the spiritual world, yet he firmly believed that the human mind must work “in nature, through nature,” and not attempt “a flight from the material world.” His dualism turned on a perceived difference between the natural world, which was “always pulling down,” and the human mind, which was always “rising,” thus running counter to nature. Frost liked the dynamics of this concept, perhaps because it affirmed his own individualistic and contrary spirit. In Creative Evolution, Bergson put forward the Lucretian idea of “life as a stream,” noting that our consciousness is “continually drawn the opposite way.” Indeed, the stream is a central metaphor in many of Frost’s poems, including “Hyla Brook,” “West-Running Brook,” “The Mountain,” and “The Generations of Men.” Robert Faggen notes, “The Frostian stream has obscure origins and moves in unpredictable and unknowable directions.”14

Frost was perpetually “expressing his own stubborn contrariness to dominant intellectual movements,” as Richard Poirier has said. His lone-striking spirit worked stubbornly against whatever grain was presented, and he found a justification for this tendency of his in Bergson, who celebrated the élan vital, that creative spirit (or enlightened stubborness) expressed by the artist or seer as resistance to any “drift” or “stated plan.” On the other hand, even Bergson represented a creed that Frost must necessarily oppose. More like Lucretius than Bergson, Frost was attracted to a wild, untamed nature that was ultimately incompatible with any human intention, any teleological twist. The ferocious, inhuman quality of nature is embodied, for example, by the “great buck” in “The Most of It,” who appears out of the wilderness of the lake and stumbles with “horny tread,” ignoring its human observer, alien and awesome.

Like his hero, William James, whose Pragmatism he taught at Plymouth in the spring of 1912, Frost wanted to believe in some higher power, what Bergson called the Source; he also wanted to ground his beliefs in the natural world, and to have room for his own innate skepticism. In the wake of Darwin, it was no longer possible to believe in the literal idea of creation; one had to adopt some form of evolutionary theory, to find a way of accommodating the needs of spirit to this convincing theory of human origins. James (who acknowledged Bergson as a major influence) suggested that a “new opinion counts as ‘true’ just in proportion as it gratifies the individual’s desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock.”15

The “argument from design,” the classic rationale for the existence of a deity, had fascinated James. Thomas Aquinas had famously argued that God fashioned each detail in nature toward some particular end. If so, James suggested, then God was obviously malevolent. “To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker’s organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer.” James wanted design to be, by contrast, “a term of promise … a vague confidence in the future.” Though James was desperately fudging here, trying to have his cake and eat it, too, the iconoclastic quality of his arguments appealed to his young disciple, Frost, who encoded his own thinking on the argument from design in a sonnet called “In White,” later revised as “Design.” The original went as follows:16

A dented spider like a snowdrop white

on a white Heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of lifeless satin cloth—

Saw ever curious eye so strange a sight?

Portent in little, assorted death and blight

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth?

The beady spider, the flower like a froth,

and the moth carried like a paper kite.

What had the flower to do with being white,

The blue Brunella every child’s delight?

What brought the kindred spider to that height?

(Make we no thesis of the miller’s plight.)

What but design of darkness and of night?

Design, design! Do I use the word aright?

Frost’s small but deeply significant revisions turned this interesting but awkward draft into one of his most devasting poems. An odd line such as “The blue Brunella every child’s delight,” for instance, is vaguely hackneyed (“every child’s delight” is precut language); Frost revised it: “The wayside blue and innocent heal-all”—a more complex and suggestive line by far. The last lines, which in the rough version are convoluted and indirect, are with a bold stroke converted into three of Frost’s most vivid concluding lines. It’s worth noting how Frost revised by going back into the syntax already present, extending it, then savagely and directly answering the question posed:

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?—

If design govern in a thing so small.

Frost was feeling his strength now, intellectually and artistically, and ready to confront the world head-on. One senses this in the fact that he went to New York City over Christmas in 1911 to visit William Hayes Ward. He wanted desperately to move beyond the narrow circles in New Hampshire where, at least, he had established himself as an educator of some consequence. By the spring of 1912, he had passed his thirty-eighth birthday, and yet he had still not fulfilled his dream of publishing a volume of poetry. His feelings of mortality were by now intense; after all, his father had lived only to the age of thirty-four. Given the fluctuations of his health, Frost imagined there was little time left. He must withdraw from the daily demands of teaching, become selfish, and find the time to devote himself wholly to the task at hand: the completion of a book of poems.

“He always said that a turning point came in 1912, at Plymouth. He had to make a decision: to be a poet or a teacher, primarily. There was no way to reconcile both careers at this time. The poems had to get his full attention, which is why he left teaching. He had written just enough poetry of the highest quality to make that apparent to him. He understood what had to be done.”17

In spring of 1912, a small flurry of acceptances from magazines encouraged Frost, and he determined to push ahead boldly. He had enough money in hand from the sale of the Derry house and his grandfather’s annuity to make a move that would involve considerable financial risk. Encouraged by John Bartlett, who was about to head off to Vancouver Island in British Columbia for a year, Frost decided to have his own adventure, to live, as he said, “a life that followed poetically.” His first inclination was to join Bartlett and his wife, Margaret, in Canada, but Elinor favored England. She wanted, she said, “to live under thatch,” and be as close to Stratford as she could. Frost wished to oblige her, and was himself attracted to England; the idea of living in the cradle of English lyric poetry was irresistible. They flipped a coin, and England—to the relief of both—won out over Canada. “It became increasingly clear,” Lesley would later recall, that her parents “wanted a dramatic change of scene together with a time, away from the burdens of teaching, for getting more poetry written.… All that had been contemplated was fresh scenery, peace to write, the excitement of change.”18

In a letter to Mrs. John Lynch of Bethlehem, New Hampshire, Elinor would write the following October: “Last summer we spent several weeks trying our very best to decide where we wanted to go, and gradually we came to feel that it would be pleasant to travel about the world a little. And finally we decided to come to England and find a little house in one of the suburbs of London, and two weeks from the day of our decision, we were on our way out of Boston Harbor.”19 There is a charming, somewhat naive, quality about the tone that Elinor adopted here; the Frosts were going to be innocents abroad, and they seemed almost to cultivate this innocence.

Ernest Silver was dismayed, but there was no dissuading Frost. He had enjoyed his year at Plymouth, and the students had been increasingly enthusiastic about his classroom performance, but Frost had found little time for his own creative work. Contemplating teaching, he looked ahead, uncomfortably, to many years of toil without sufficient time for his own writing. He gambled that if worst came to worst, he could always return to New England and high school teaching.

“We stored our furniture, and brought only bedclothes, two floor rugs, books and some pictures,” Elinor told a friend.20 By August 1912, the family was ready to go. Lesley, who had just turned thirteen, was eager, as were Carol, now ten, Irma, who was nine, and Marjorie, who was seven. Their steamship, the SS Parisian, was scheduled to leave for Glasgow on the evening of August 23, carrying a full list of passengers and a heavy cargo that included 211 barrels of apples and 46,665 bushels of wheat. Ernest Silver helped them pack, and he put Elinor and the children on the train for Boston, since Frost himself had gone ahead to make final arrangements for their passage. The ship’s departure was delayed until the next morning, but the Frosts didn’t mind. They were putting everything beyond them now. They were starting fresh.