8

IN A YELLOW WOOD
1914–1915

God help us not to take the English as the English take us.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1919

Throughout the summer and early fall of 1913, Frost worked hard assembling North of Boston, a second volume of poems. His working title, more descriptive than evocative, was Farm Servants and Other People. Among those given the poems for comment was T. E. Hulme, who met with Frost on July 1 in London to discuss the manuscript. Frost used this meeting to put forward his current ideas on poetry, especially his notion of “the sound of sense.” He later reported to Flint that his theories “got just the rub they needed” from Hulme, whose sharp, critical mind had made him an important figure among the imagists.

Frost also gave a copy of the volume to Flint, whose response was warmly appreciative: “I have read your little dramas, and I like them very much. (It occurs to me typing this from a rough note that you might try your hand at a play later on when you are well known.) You have a lode there from which you ought to extract quantities of good clean ore.” Flint offered a few minor criticisms, but was mainly enthusiastic: “I have nothing to say to you about these poems, except: go on!”1

That Frost was now brimming with ideas about poetry is evident from a letter to John Bartlett; though his rhetoric is self-congratulatory, it may be seen as Frost’s way of cheering himself along: “To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable craftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently. I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of versification. You see the great successes in recent poetry have been made on the assumption that the music of words was a matter of harmonized vowels and consonants. Both Swinburne and Tennyson arrived largely at effects in assonation. But they were on the wrong track or at any rate on a short length of it. Anyone else who goes that way must go after them. And that’s where most are going. I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.”2

“The sound of sense” was an idea he would develop carefully in the coming year and return to throughout his life. Its chief formulation occurs in a letter to Bartlett written the following February:

I give you a new definition of sentence:

A sentence is a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.

You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeves and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but—it is bad for the clothes.

The number of words you may string on one sentence-sound is not fixed but there is always danger of over loading.

The sentence-sounds are very definite entities. (This is no literary mysticism I am preaching.) They are as definite as words. It is not impossible that they could be collected in a book though I don’t at present see on what system they would be catalogued.

They are apprehended by the ear. They are gathered by the ear from the vernacular and brought into books. Many of them are already familiar to us in books. I think no writer invents them. The most original writer only catches them fresh from talk, where they grow spontaneously.3

Frost continues for several pages, culminating in the “greatest test” of a piece of prose or a poem: “You listen for the sentence sounds. If you find some of those not bookish, caught fresh from the mouths of people, some of them striking, all of them definite and recognizable, so recognizable that with a little trouble you can place them and even name them, you know you have found a writer.” He elaborates in another letter to Sidney Cox: “Just so many sentence sounds belong to a man as just so many vocal runs belong to one kind of bird. We come into the world with them and create none of them.”4

Frost explained to Bartlett that the way to hear “the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts off the words.” A poet 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.” He was arguing here, implicitly, against Robert Bridges, the new British poet laureate, who believed in the fixed quantity of English syllables. Frost understood that the speaking voice is, somewhat paradoxically, both idiosyncratic and dependent upon the formal structures of English sound patterns. He praised “the abstract vitality of our speech”—a vitality that connects every speaker to the language itself, a community of shared signals. But what both separates and connects the true artist to this community is an original way of “breaking the sounds.”

Two factors are always at work in a line of verse: the abstract possibility of the line and the poet’s individual way of “breaking” words across it. The poetry, indeed, resides in the difference between these two possibilities. Thus, a line such as “There was never a sound beside the wood but one,” the first line of “Mowing,” can be scanned as iambic pentameter—in the abstract; in its vocalization, however, any number of different ways of scanning the line would seem more appropriate. Certainly, in reading the poem, a poet would be unlikely (and unwise) to stick to the strict iambic flow. The pleasure of poetry inheres in the contrast, then, between this abstract potential (the iambic regularity) and the vernacular embodiment of the line, which is governed by the poet’s own voice and coded into the language. As Frost put it, “The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom, and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation. It is not for us in any Greek or Latin poem because our ears have not been filled with the tones of Greek and Roman talk. It is the most volatile and at the same time important part of poetry. It goes and the language becomes a dead language, the poetry dead poetry.… Words exist in the mouth, not in books.”5

Having settled into Beaconsfield once again, with the older children in school and Elinor teaching the younger ones, Frost found himself on fire with the urge to write. The homesickness that had begun in late spring was now yielding marvelous fruit in poems such as “After Apple-Picking,” “Mending Wall,” and “Birches”—all written in Beaconsfield. The last one, inspired by a poem on the same subject by the American poet Lucy Larcom, began from a fragment about icicles dating back to 1906.6 It opens fetchingly:

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

Lesley, in the journal she kept when she was six, wrote alluringly about the New England game of swinging birches: “On the way home,” she said, “i climbed up a hi birch and came down with it and i stopt in the air about three feet and pap cout me.” Her father had been taught how to do this in the summer of 1886 by Charlie Peabody, a neighbor from Lawrence. The practice of climbing birches until your weight brought the trunk plunging to earth had caught his imagination, as it now caught Lesley’s:

i like to climb trees very much but mam doesnt like me to becose i tare my stocings so i have to stop i do not like to but i have to at frst i was scared to swing with birchis but now i am not so much scared becose it wont hurt me. an i am not scared if it swings down with me if it does klere down with me i dont like it if it dosunt i climb uther threes but they downt swing as the birchis do so i downt like them aswell i climb oak and mapel but with me they swing with me. i like that to but not as well but papa likes to swing beter. i climb apale trees but those dont swing a tall do they.7

Frost’s later accounts of the writing of “Birches” were often misleading. He would tell admiring audiences that he wrote it one morning in Beaconsfield “with one stroke of the pen.”8 But he explained to Robert Penn Warren many years later that the poem was “two fragments soldered together so long ago I have forgotten where the joint is.”9 The poem, which was originally called “Swinging Birches,” catches perfectly the “sound of sense” in poetry; while it is written in classic blank verse, one cannot help but hear Frost’s grainy, idiosyncratic voice ushering the syllables into his own strong vernacular. He does not worry about shifting the blank verse line to meet the needs of the rhythm as he heard it building, as below:

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

These lines will not scan as iambic pentamenter unless you radically distort the language as it is spoken. Nobody, for instance, would accent the first line above as follows in reading it aloud:

Soon thé sun’s wármth makes thém shed crýstal shélls.

A more natural way of scanning the line would put stress on the first word, spreading the rest of the stresses more evenly throughout. In recorded versions of this line, Frost seems to emphasize virtually every syllable except the second (“the”)—a kind of flattening out that is not untypical of New England folk dialects.

The poem has the rambling quality of everyday speech, a characteristic made explicit in the twenty-first and twenty-second lines: “But I was going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm.” Readers feel as though they are listening to a man talking away and likely to take any kind of sudden turn toward Truth—which may be defined here as any point of enlightenment that occurs in the poet’s brain. But this rambling is deceptive; the poem, as soldered together in the final act of composition, is thoroughly unified, emphasizing the need that all human beings feel when “weary of considerations” to “get away from earth awhile.”

Frost’s commonplace theme of the wish to escape, to get away from his earthly troubles, is given perfect symbolic form in the trope of the boy climbing to heaven on the slender birch. Yet the greatness of this poem lies in the ending, where the poet emphasizes that he wants to come down before being snatched away. There is no desire for transcendental rapture that excludes a safe return to the mundane:

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

The attractions of this poem are manifold, but its sensuousness is a crucial part of what holds the reader in thrall. The visual impact is strong, too, beginning with that image of the birches loaded with ice on “a sunny winter morning / After a rain.” Here, as elsewhere in Frost, a covert sexual energy suffuses the imagery:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

“Birches” is, as much as anything, a poem about onanistic fantasy, about an isolated boy with the urge to ride these trees to the ground, over and over again, “Until he took the stiffness out of them, / And not one but hung limp.” The poem re-creates the curve of desire found in the sexual act, from anticipation, exhilaration, and fulfillment to the letting down at the end. That these sexual undertones are neatly buried in the literal imagery of birch-bending lends an element of metaphysical wit to the poem that is not the least of its appeal.

The idea for “Mending Wall” had come to him while in Scotland. Among the many people whom Frost had met in Kingsbarns was J. C. Smith, an inspector of schools from Edinburgh with a strong literary bent. Smith later recalled walking in the Fifeshire countryside with Frost and seeing “dry stone dykes” that reminded the New Englander of similar walls that had once absorbed so much of his time. Back in Beaconsfield, Frost’s mind turned to a particular wall on the Derry farm that “I hadn’t mended in several years and which must be in a terrible condition.”10

“Mending Wall” was written in the fall of 1913, and it “contrasts two types of people,” as Frost later said.11 The poet-narrator observes rather quaintly: “He is all pine and I am apple orchard.” The poem centers on the repair of a wall by two farmers, an activity initiated by the speaker:

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

The poem rapidly becomes metaphorical. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it opens, and the line is repeated later as the narrator contemplates his own mischievous nature, which urges him to suggest to his neighbor that elves are responsible for the undoing of this wall. The taciturn neighbor will only mutter: “Good fences make good neighbors,” a proverbial line quoted often in almanacs of the nineteenth century.12 This catchy notion has often given readers pause, as Frost noted in 1962: “People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it. The secret of what it means I keep.”13

The secret is not so hard to fathom. Frost often emphasized the need for boundaries taken as liberating rather than confining limits. Richard Poirier observes that the real significance of “Mending Wall” is “that it suggests how much for Frost freedom is contingent upon some degree of restriction. More specifically, it can be said that restrictions, or forms, are a precondition for expression. Without them, even nature ceases to offer itself up for a reading.”14 Everywhere, in language and nature, Frost finds—or self-consciously erects—barriers that, as Marion Montgomery has noted, “serve as a framework for mutual understanding and respect.”15

As in so many of Frost’s best poems, various levels in the poem may be discerned, and these are often contradictory. This is especially so if one attempts to find an autobiographical strain in the poem. Frost himself made this point in later comments, as to Charles Foster at Bread Loaf in 1938, when he maintained: “I am both wall-builder and wall-destroyer.”16

In “Mending Wall,” it is, importantly, the speaker, not the “old-stone savage” living next door, who insists on the act of wall building. If hunters should come along at any time and undo the wall, he is quick to fix it. And he insists on the yearly ritual, as if civilization depends upon the collective activity of making barriers. There is a lot of “making” and “mending” in this poem, and it is more than a mere wall that is erected. One senses a profound commitment to the act of creating community in the speaker, who allies his voice with the “something” that sends frozen groundswells under the wall to disrupt it. (One could, perhaps, make something of the fact that the neighbor is capable of saying nothing himself except an old proverb.) The energy of the speaker’s imagination unsettles and builds at the same time, a paradoxical notion that would seem to lie at the heart of the creative process itself.

It is intriguing to consider how many of Frost’s best poems reflect on the act of creation, the process of breaking down the forms of reality given by the world and remaking them, restoring them to freshness. Frost’s aesthetic was largely derived from the Romantics, especially Coleridge, who argued in the Biographia Literaria that the imagination of the poet “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate.” The enterprise of poetry, from Wordsworth on, was regarded as the work of defamiliarizing the familiar by freshening the vision: hence Pound’s injunction to “make it new.” For Coleridge and Wordsworth both, the chief opponent of making it new was “custom,” and the work of the poet (in Coleridge’s terminology) was to release “wonder” from the “familiar.” In The Prelude, Wordsworth regularly condemns “habit,” “use and custom,” and “the regular action of the world,” asking us to experience the miracle of being in the most commonplace objects:

And the world’s native produce, as it meets

The sense with less habitual stretch of mind,

Is ponder’d as a miracle.

The criterion for freshness is always “the child’s sense of wonder and novelty.”

“After Apple-Picking” was written in the same fall, and it takes up the workings of the imagination as an explicit theme. Frost’s old Harvard professor George Santayana once defined the artist as “a person consenting to dream of reality.” This poem centers on the idea of “the great harvest” of imaginative work that the narrator “himself desired,” although a firm note of regret is attached to those experiences (poems) that were not brought across the line, translated, into poems:

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

One can hardly imagine a better analogy for the gathering of poems from a poet’s memory than this.

The poem begins quite realistically:

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Thus far the narrator provides a literal description of a commonplace farm activity, with only a hint at something metaphysical in the phrase “Toward heaven still.” But the literalness dissolves in the next lines, as the speaker drowses off:

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

The tenses suddenly grow indistinct, and one cannot be sure where dream and reality intersect. The reader plunges through the looking glass of the ice into an imaginative world brimming with “load on load of apples coming in.”

The form of the poem is itself unique in Frost, as Reuben A. Brower notes in his remarkable reading of this particular “lyric-idyll,” as he calls it:

Everything said throughout the poem comes to the reader through sentences filled with incantatory repetitions and rhymes and in waves of sound linked by likeness of pattern. From the opening lines, apparently matter-of-fact talk falls into curious chain-like sentences, rich in end-rhymes and echoes of many sorts. But although the voice seems to be lapsing into the rhyming fits of insomnia, the fits shape themselves into distinct and subtly varied patterns.17

One can visualize Frost in his Morris chair in The Bungalow, his mind swirling with images of the life he left behind in New Hampshire. He was consciously making use of what he knew was extraordinary material, a bin stored with imagery that he could draw on. There seemed no end to the poems he might fashion from this experience, and even that material which had not yet been transformed into poetry was still there, waiting, like the apples that had struck the earth and been transported to the cider-apple heap—a hoard that would create a certain amount of anxiety in the poet until that time when he found the creative energy to raid it; thus, he could write: “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.”

*   *   *

By the time Frost returned from Scotland, he was determined to get the new book into production as soon as possible. The date had been delayed from fall 1913 to spring 1914, which was itself an irritant. Frost had seen too many years flicker by without public recognition, and he was eager to get his recent poems before an audience. Even if the reviewers of the first book had not all been terribly enthusiastic, there was a warm response among his friends. J. C. Smith had written on September 15, 1913, from Edinburgh, for instance: “There’s no doubt about it. You’ve got the poetic gift.” He told Frost that his family had spent “two delightful evenings reading your book aloud after dinner.” He added: “Let me know when to look for your second volume.”18

By November, a fresh, feisty attitude toward his work seems to have taken over, as seen in a letter to John Bartlett:

You musn’t take me too seriously if I now proceed to brag a bit about my exploits as a poet. There is one qualifying fact always to bear in mind: there is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it—don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out, and would if it were a thing I could do by taking thought.19

Frost’s resolve was marked by efforts to press himself upon English literary society. Through Hulme and others, he managed to befriend many of the leading poets of the day, such as Laurence Binyon, W. H. Davies, Ford Madox Ford, John Masefield, Wilfrid Gibson, and Robert Bridges. Harold Monro also helped, introducing Frost whenever he could to influential writers and critics. Gibson introduced Frost to Lascelles Abercrombie, a highly original critic and writer of dramatic poems not unlike those in Frost’s North of Boston. Reading Abercrombie’s recent sequence of dramatic poems, Emblems of Love, Frost quickly saw the parallels between them and worked to enlarge upon the acquaintance.

Another good contact, also urged upon him by Gibson, was W. H. Hudson. A sharp-witted, acerbic man with a good eye for poetry, Hudson was given a manuscript of one of the longer poems from the new manuscript (probably “The Death of the Hired Man”), and his response was heartening. “Forgive me for keeping your poem a day or two longer than I ought to have done,” he wrote. “I very much like it, and imagine it must be unique in American poetry; it is like nothing I have seen from your country, and I foresee a welcome for it in ours. It was a great pleasure to meet you the other day. I owe Gibson a good turn for that.”20 Two weeks later, Frost was introduced to Edward Thomas over lunch at a restaurant in St. Martins Lane, near Trafalgar Square—an encounter that would lead to a friendship affecting both men profoundly.

One senses from his letters home that Frost felt at ease, if not at home, in England now. “The Englishmen are very charming,” he wrote to Thomas Bird Mosher. “I begin to think I shall stay with them till I’m deported. If I weren’t so poor I should plan to stay five years anyway.”21 Elsewhere, he writes to friends in America of “gadding” about at parties in Kensington with Elinor and attending long literary lunches at the Vienna Café in Soho. The Frosts also went to the theater as often as they could.

The family had a meager but happy Christmas in 1913. Frost made most of the toys for the children himself, fashioning them from wood. A tiny evergreen—nothing like the massive balsam firs that had been common on the farm in Derry—was brought in from a nearby copse and “decorated with cardboard ornaments and paper angels,” as Elinor wrote home. In later years, none of the children would speak of this as a time of deprivation, however makeshift the arrangements.

The friendship with Gibson, who was four years younger than Frost, flourished this winter. Frost admired the stripped-down quality of Gibson’s diction and the dramatic quality of his poems (Gibson wrote a good deal of full-scale drama in verse). Like Frost’s, his poems often focused on working people, as in Stonefolds (1907), a collection of small verse dramas featuring the poor sheep farmers of Northumberland—a group who had much in common with the farmers of Frost’s northern New England. The brooding, imagistic quality of this work appealed to Frost, as did the poems of Gibson’s Daily Bread (1910), where dwellers in urban slums and mining towns were given a voice. He was also much taken by Gibson’s popularity; here was a poet who had, indeed, managed to write “for all sorts and kinds.” How quickly the friendship blossomed is made clear by Frost in a letter he wrote to an acquaintance back in the States in early December: “Gibson is my best friend. Probably you know his work. He is much talked of in America at the present time. He’s just one of the plain folks with none of the marks of the literary poseur about him—none of the wrongheadedness of the professional literary man.”22

For some time now, the Frosts had all been wanting to move away from Beaconsfield, which lacked the full charm of rural England. The idea of going into the Gloucester countryside, near Gibson, occurred in midwinter. Frost imagined it would be pleasant to live near “those who spoke our language and understood our thoughts.”23 Another reason may have been that the two elder daughters, Lesley and Irma, had begun to complain about the private school they were attending. After the first two terms were completed, they both refused to go back, and Elinor found herself having to instruct all four children every morning. The atmosphere in The Bungalow became altogether too claustrophobic.

In mid-January, Frost found tenants willing to wait upon his convenience. Urged on by Gibson and Abercrombie, he began searching for a cottage in Gloucestershire. Gibson had recently moved to the village of Greenway, and Abercrombie lived only a few miles away at Ryton. After months of searching, Gibson found Little Iddens, a cottage in nearby Ledington—a classic west-country hamlet in the Dymock region. The last letter that Frost wrote from Beaconsfield was dated March 26, 1914, his fortieth birthday.

Little Iddens, about two miles from the Old Nailshop, where Gibson lived, was a small seventeenth-century cottage that bordered an undulating stretch of open fields. It was not a spacious house: much of the ground floor (made of smoothly worn brick) was taken up by a shed once used for cattle. The hearth-centered living room had a long oak table for dining pushed against one wall, and this adjoined a tiny kitchen; upstairs, reached by a steeply pitched staircase, were two bedrooms and a sleeping alcove. The low ceilings and tiny, leaded windows accentuated the cramped quality of the house.

For all these drawbacks, Little Iddens had many advantages, including charm. Its source of water was an old well by the side door, with a helmeted pump that splashed into a low tank. The views of the surrounding hay fields were idyllic, and each field was bordered by tall elms or bushes. An orchard of fruit trees lay beside the house itself, with apples, pears, and plums coming into flower just as the Frosts arrived. A fine vegetable garden was already going. Not a month after moving in, Frost wrote to Flint that he was “already up to my waist in peas and broadbeans, and holding up a hoe to mark the place of my disappearance.”24 The house struck everyone in the Frost family as an English equivalent of the farm in Derry.

Among the many good neighbors was John Haines, who was Abercrombie’s distant cousin. A lawyer by profession, he loved poetry and eagerly devoured the latest journals. He was also an amateur botanist, like Frost, and adored long country walks. Haines described Frost at the time as “a very fine looking man indeed. He was of medium height but had a splendid physique and was especially broad-shouldered. His eyes were an attractive shade of jade blue, and extremely penetrating.… In disposition he was happy and cheerful. He talked much and well but liked occasional long silences and especially late at night enjoyed giving long, slow soliloquies on psychological and philosophical subjects.… His sense of humour pervaded all his talk and he could be sarcastic if he wanted to, though usually his humour was kindly and he had a great sense of fun.”25

Edward Thomas, whom Frost had by now met several times, showed up with his son that spring. The Thomases had been cycling through Wales, and they spent a week at Little Iddens, sleeping in the loft with the two elder Frost children. This was a crucial time for this friendship, which from the first had been significant to both men. In later years, Helen Thomas would put her memories of first encountering Frost into her autobiography, recalling that

Robert was a thickset man, not as tall as Edward, with a shock of grey hair. His face was tanned and weatherbeaten and his features powerful. His eyes, shaded by bushy grey eyebrows, were blue and clear. It was a striking and pleasing face, rugged and lined. He was dressed in an open-necked shirt and loose earth-stained trousers held up by a wide belt. His arms and chest were bare and very brown. His hands were hard and gnarled. He spoke with a slight American accent.26

What life was like at Little Iddens is perhaps best seen in a recollection by Eleanor Farjeon, a friend of Edward Thomas’s who wrote a biography of him:

The Frosts did not live by the clock, their clock conformed to the Frosts. There was always time for the thing in hand. Meals (bedtime too I believe) were when you felt like them. Irregular hours for children meant an extension of experience for them; it was more important for a child to go for a walk in the dark than to have an unbroken night’s rest. By day, walks and talks were not shortened for the sake of things less interesting. When the children were hungry enough to be more interested in eating than in what they were doing, they came indoors and helped themselves to food that was left available in the small, pink-washed living room: bread, fruit, cold rice in a bowl.… The centre of the Frosts’ life was out-of-doors and household standards mattered very little. If they had, Elinor struck me as too delicate to cope with them, indeed none of the family seemed especially robust; but though they were pale-complexioned they were lively and active, and too resourceful to be at a loose end.27

Elinor did suffer that spring and summer from the nervous condition that had plagued her for many years. Always keyed into the fluctuations of her husband’s literary fortunes, her anxiety level soared after the publication of North of Boston on May 15, as two weeks of appalling silence from reviewers were followed by a brief mention in the Times Literary Supplement, where Frost was weakly commended for his “little pictures from ordinary life.” What kept Frost from despair was the knowledge that his three new friends—Abercrombie, Gibson, and Thomas—had already written reviews on assignment that were bound to be favorable; Pound, too, had written a note to express interest in reviewing the book, although Frost considered this a mixed blessing, given Pound’s response to A Boy’s Will.

The first of the friendly reviews appeared in the Nation on June 13, a detailed and lengthy piece full of high praise by Abercrombie. “We find very little of the traditional manner of poetry in Mr. Frost’s work,” he wrote, “save a peculiar adaptation, as his usual form, of the pattern of blank verse. It is poetry which is not much more careful than good prose is to stress and extract the inmost values and suggestive force of words; it elaborates simile and metaphor scarcely more than good conversation does. But it is apt to treat the familiar images and acts of ordinary life much as poetry is usually inclined to treat words—to put them, that is to say, into such positions of relationship that some unexpected virtue comes out of them.”

Abercrombie pointed out how difficult it was to locate Frost’s originality, however unmistakable it might be; it owed something, he thought, to Frost’s ability to get “poetry back again into touch with the living vigours of speech … the rise and fall, the stressed pauses and little hurries, of spoken language.” He cited “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” and “A Hundred Collars” as examples of Frost’s best work, noting that this poet had achieved distinction “by development rather than by rebellion.” His poetic ancestry could be traced back to Theocritus, Chaucer, and Wordsworth—a distinguished lineage.28

Frost had benefited immensely from being part of this informal group, the Dymock poets—the only such group with whom he would ever willingly associate. One catches a glimpse of what these gatherings were like in a poem called “The Golden Room,” by Wilfrid Gibson:

Do you remember the still summer evening

When in the cosy cream-washed living-room

Of the Old Nailshop we all talked and laughed—

Our neighbors from the Gallows, Catherine

and Lascelles Abercromie; Rupert Brooke;

Elinor and Robert Frost, living awhile

At Little Iddens, who’d brought over with them

Helen and Edward Thomas? In the lamplight

We talked and laughed, but for the most part listened

While Robert Frost kept on and on and on

In his slow New England fashion for our delight,

Holding us with shrewd turns and racy quips,

And the rare twinkle of his grave blue eyes?

We sat there in the lamplight while the day

Died from rose-latticed casements, and the plovers

Called over the low meadows till the owls

Answered them from the elms; we sat and talked—

Now a quick flash from Abercombie, now

A murmured dry half-heard aside from Thomas,

Now a clear, laughing word from Brooke, and then

Again Frost’s rich and ripe philosophy

That had the body and tang of good draught-cider

And poured as clear a stream.

This is not marvelous verse, but the portrait of Frost reveals something of the public manner he later perfected on platforms across the United States. His homespun “rich and ripe philosophy” went down well among the Dymock group, and it played well in England overall, as it would eventually in Frost’s own country. The “shrewd turns and racy quips” would characterize Frost’s later conversation, too, as a friend corroborates: “One expected the unexpected in Frost’s conversation, the way he might change the subject abruptly or underscore something with a metaphor that took you by surprise. It kept you listening, on edge.”29

Gibson’s poem was written in 1926, and its nostalgia owes something to the fact that both Thomas and Brooke had been killed in the war—indeed, the war began that summer, with the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Francis Ferdinand. Oddly enough, none of Frost’s letters of this summer refer to the darkening cloud across Europe. It was as if, once plunged into the bucolic world of Gloucestershire, Frost’s heart and mind were fully absorbed by local details. The only news that really interested him was news of North of Boston.

A few good reviews arrived that summer, with Richard Aldington writing in the Egoist, Ford Madox Ford in Outlook, and Gibson in the Bookman. Not every word satisfied Frost, as might be expected; even the friendly reviews could rankle. Aldington, for instance, wrote: “It is in cumulative effect rather than in detail that Mr. Frost gets his results. He tells you a little or a big incident in rather stumbling blank verse, places two or three characters before you, and then tells you another incident with fresh characters, making you more interested all the time, until at the end of the book you realize that in a simple, unaffected sort of way he has put before you the whole life of the people ‘North of Boston.’”30

A note of restraint in the Gibson review also caught Frost’s attention, and he would later say to Haines, “I saw enough of his hypocritical joy over my good reviews last summer.”31 This friendship had obviously cooled, as scattered remarks throughout his correspondence suggest. He regarded Gibson’s lack of direct exposure to the kinds of people and situations he wrote about a limitation resulting in superficiality and inauthenticity. Furthermore, he agreed with those critics (Pound among them) who dismissed Gibson on purely technical grounds as deficient.

The essential friendship was with Edward Thomas. A graduate of Lincoln College, Oxford, the thirty-six-year-old writer had earned his living by his pen for a decade, publishing over two dozen travel books and biographies, as well as critical essays, reviews, and even one novel. It was at Frost’s suggestion that Thomas began writing poems. “I referred him to paragraphs in his book The Pursuit of Spring and told him to write it in verse form in exactly the same cadence,” Frost recalled.

One sees the Frostian influence on Thomas at first glance. The poems often recount a rural incident or focus on the natural world. The narrative style is plainspoken, unadorned, imagistic. One feels the strong grip of the poet’s mind as he attempts to come to terms with some problem, a contradictory impulse, an idea. These are (to borrow a phrase of Stevens’s) poems “of the mind / In the act of finding what will suffice.” They move casually, but inexorably, toward moments of quiet illumination.

Thomas lived in the hamlet of Steep, southwest of London, with Helen, his wife of a dozen years, and their three children. Like Frost, he was given to dark periods. When he could not bear the clatter of family life, he would go off by himself, frequently staying for long periods with friends in London or elsewhere. In fact, when Frost first met him in 1913 he was staying with a friend in East Grinstead, where he had gone to get some work accomplished on a biography of Keats.

The two men made a vital connection. Indeed, Frost never got over this brief friendship. He felt that for the first time in his life he had been fully understood; for years afterward he mourned Thomas, who died in the war. Years later, Frost explained to a friend that he had not forced Thomas in his own direction: “The most our congeniality could do was confirm us both in what we were.” He elaborates:

I dragged him out from under the heap of his own work in prose he was buried alive under. He was throwing into his big perfunctory histories of Marlborough and the like, written to order, such poetry as would make him a name if he were but given credit for it. I made him see that he owed it to himself and to poetry to have it out by itself in poetic form where it must suffer itself to be admired. It took me some time. I bantered, teased and bullied all the summer we were together at Ledington and Ryton. All he had to do was put his poetry in a form that declared itself. The theme must be the same, the accent exactly the same. He saw it and was tempted. It was plain that he had wanted to be a poet all the years he had been writing about poets not worth his little finger.32

In August 1914, the Thomas family rented a farmhouse within sight of Little Iddens that was owned by a farmer named Chandler. Though full of promise, the holiday began badly when Mr. Chandler (who was also a member of the army reserves) was summoned to active duty, leaving a good deal of chores behind for Frost and Thomas to accomplish on his behalf. Helen Thomas, meanwhile, found the isolation of Ledington confining, as did the children. Nor did she find the attraction of the Frost family quite as alluring as did her husband. She called Elinor “a rather nebulous personality” and looked askance at her housekeeping, which was “a very haphazard affair.” She was also unimpressed by Elinor’s cooking: “I remember that when dinner time approached in the middle of the day, she would take a bucket of potatoes into the field and sit on the grass to peel them—without water to my astonishment—and that, as far as I could see, was often the only preparation for a meal.” Nevertheless, it was “obvious that Robert and Edward were very congenial to each other.” She recalled long evenings of sitting around on the floor of Little Iddens, everyone with his or her back to the wall, singing folk songs and eating “cheap sugary biscuits” from a tin.33

The weather was blissful all summer, a succession of warm, breezy days that soon cheered the entire company, and a planned excursion to Wales was postponed. Frost’s spirits were boosted by the three separate reviews that Thomas had written of North of Boston. “These poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric,” Thomas wrote in the Daily News, “and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation. Their language is free from the poetical words and forms that are the chief material of secondary poets. The metre avoids not only the old-fashioned pomp and sweetness, but the later fashion also of discord and fuss.” He saw that while many of the lines were plain in themselves, they were “bound together and made elements of beauty by a calm eagerness of emotion.”34 In the prestigious English Review, he described “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” and “The Wood-Pile” as “masterpieces of deep and mysterious tenderness.”

The relations between Thomas and Frost were mutually beneficial. Thomas was stimulated by Frost, who beckoned him toward writing poems, while Frost basked in the warm attention of a strong, critical mind. Frost’s excitement at being taken seriously, especially with regard to the “sound of sense” idea, is evident in a letter home to Cox: “Thomas thinks he will write a book on what my definition of the sentence means for literary criticism.” He added: “If I didn’t drop into poetry every time I sat down to write I should be tempted to do a book on what it means for education.”35

One first catches a glimpse of Thomas as a poet in a letter to Frost of December 15, 1914, where he talks about his new vocation: “I am in it & make no mistake.”36 He says that his writing habits, over the years, have prepared him well for his new art: “My bad habits and customs and duties of writing will make it rather easy to write when I’ve no business to. At the same time I find myself engrossed and conscious of a possible perfection as I never was in prose. Also I’m very impatient of my prose, and of reviews & of review books. And yet I have been uncommonly cheerful mostly. I have been rather pleased with some of the pieces, of course, but it’s not wholly that. Still, I won’t begin thanking you just yet, tho if you like I will put it down now that you are the only begetter right enough.”

*   *   *

Early in September 1914, the Frosts left Little Iddens for The Gallows, a farmhouse in Ryton that rambled under a broad swath of thatch that had been leased from Lord Beauchamp by Lascelles and Catherine Abercrombie. The spacious house had recently been renovated, and there were essentially two separate parts to it. The Gallows would be empty for much of the fall because the Abercrombies were traveling with their two young children; when they returned, the idea was that both families could easily share the large house, thus saving on fuel costs.

The nudge had come from the owners of Little Iddens, who wanted it back. Frost did not mind, since now Elinor could fulfill her dream of living “under thatch.” Another attraction of The Gallows was the game preserve of over a thousand acres that adjoined it. Abercrombie and his family, as tenants of the local lord, were at liberty to use these grounds for picnics and rambles, and the Frost family joined them on several occasions, usually after a long Sunday lunch.

Edward Thomas was a frequent visitor at The Gallows that fall, and he and Frost went on “botanizing” walks, as Frost put it. One quirk of Thomas was that he often regretted the particular path he had taken. Frost once said to him, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.” The image of Thomas stuck at a crossroads, uncertain about which branch to follow, inspired “The Road Not Taken,” although Frost had been contemplating the image for a while. On February 10, 1912, for instance, he had written to Susan Hayes Ward: “Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled.”37

That poem, which opens Frost’s third book of poetry, Mountain Interval, is one of the high crests of American poetry:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

The overpowering simplicity of the image is archetypal in its appeal: every reader has stood at some fork and wondered which might be the better path. Most will have wanted to take “the one less traveled by,” and thus be thought a maverick or “lone striker.” Yet the poem throws this desire into raw, ironic light: “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” the narrator says, and the sigh reveals a certain sadness combined with a wan feeling of disingenuousness. One imagines the speaker looking back from old age, his grandchildren at his feet. He says, “I took the road less traveled by,” while knowing—in his heart of hearts—that an element of posing is involved here.

There may well be no road less traveled by, as the poet has suggested in the three preceding stanzas. The road taken is “as just as fair,” he notes: “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” (italics mine). In case the reader did not understand, the next line is more explicit: “And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Both paths, it would seem, are pristine, untrodden. This certainly puts a twist on the last, aphoristic couplet: “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” As frequently happens in Frost, the poet builds into his poem a fierce contradiction: the speaker of the poem gestures toward a simple, even simplistic, reading, while the poet himself demands a more complex, ironic reading. The play between these antithetical readings becomes an important part of the poem’s dynamic.

One morning in late September, Frost and Thomas went for a long walk in the dense preserve beside The Gallows, and as they emerged from the woods a leathery-faced gamekeeper confronted them. These woods were not open to the public, he said. Frost snapped back at him, and was called “a damned cottager”—an insult that may have recalled Frost’s having been called a “hen-man” back at Pinkerton. He was barely restrained by Thomas from hitting the man. Rather foolishly, Frost followed the gamekeeper home, while Thomas hovered behind him, terrified by his friend’s temper. When the gamekeeper came to the door, Frost threatened him with a beating if he ever insulted him again.

The next day a constable called at The Gallows, saying that a complaint had been lodged. Frost was stunned, and livid. He appealed to Gibson for help, but there was no assistance there—a point that Frost would hold against him. (“You mustn’t tell me a single thing about Gibson,” he wrote to John Haines the next year from the States, “if you don’t want to detract from the pleasure of your letters.… I can’t help looking on him as the worst snob I met in England and I can’t help blaming the snob he is for the most unpleasant memory I carried away from England: I mean my humiliating fight with the gamekeeper. Gibson is a coward and a snob not to have saved me from all that.”38

Apparently Thomas felt that he had acted cowardly himself, refusing to stand up to the gamekeeper as Frost had. At least in Frost’s later retelling, this sense of cowardice is what drove Thomas to enlist in the army. “That’s why he went to war,” Frost declared baldly in 1936.39 The situation with the gamekeeper, as it were, was resolved when Abercrombie returned. The charges were quickly dropped, and Lord Beauchamp himself sent a personal note of apology to Frost (and a nasty note to the gamekeeper, telling him that if he wanted to fight he should join the army).

Early in the fall, a letter arrived from Henry Holt, a publisher in New York, at the office of David Nutt in London. Mrs. Holt, a Vermonter, had been given a copy of North of Boston by a friend. She had persuaded her husband to offer Frost a contract for the American rights, with options on his future work. After some haggling, an agreement was reached whereby Holt would take 150 copies of the unbound sheets of North of Boston for a trial run—not an auspicious beginning. Mrs. Nutt herself chided Holt: “Under present political circumstances, American publishers ought to show some willingness to help English publishers who have sufficient daring and intelligence to recognize the talent of one of their own countrymen.”40

Frost learned of the arrangements in the beginning of November, and said to Elinor, “Now we can go home.” The idea of returning to America became more urgent when Germany announced that it would soon blockade British ports. However much the Frosts liked England, they did not want to be marooned there for the duration of the war. There was also the question of finances: life in England had proved more expensive than he and Elinor had calculated, and even loans from various friends had failed to tide them over. In addition, the price of the passage home had risen significantly since their previous crossing, and there was no sign of its decreasing. All of these factors pointed toward an early departure.

Frost once again had to borrow money. This time he went to Abercrombie, Haines, and J. C. Smith. (Gibson was clearly not approachable in this regard.) All three offered Frost a loan without making the transaction difficult, and Frost gave each a promissory note. Tickets were booked on the American liner St. Paul, scheduled to leave from Liverpool on February 13. At this point in the war, it seemed a safer bet than a British liner, which might pose a more likely target for German subs.

Not surprisingly, Frost’s mind turned anxiously toward home as winter deepened. He did not want to take another teaching job, although he knew this might be necessary. He dreamed of “a quiet job in a small college where I would be allowed to teach something a little new on the technique of writing and where I should have some honor for what I suppose myself to have done in poetry.”41 Shyly, he appended a footnote to the line where he asked for “some honor,” saying “just a little bit.” He wanted, rightly, to be recognized for who he was, for what he had accomplished. His self-confidence would soar and plunge, depending on the day; but a base level of reasonable assurance could now be counted on. He let his true feelings run free in an early-February letter to Cox in which he said, “The book [North of Boston] is epoch-making. I don’t ask anyone to say so. All I ask now is to be allowed to live.”42

That Frost was still uncertain about going back to America is evident from a conversation he had, sometime during the fall, with the young poet Robert Graves, whom he met in Harold Monro’s bookshop. According to Graves, Frost was still actively debating whether or not to return home. He supposedly said that he might even enlist in the British army.43 Since no mention of this plan is recorded elsewhere, it seems likely to have been a passing fancy, summoned expressly to impress Graves, who stood before him in an officer’s uniform.

Back at The Gallows, Frost did manage to keep working. A number of poems for Mountain Interval were written in quick succession, including “The Sound of Trees,” “A Patch of Old Snow,” and “The Cow in Apple Time.” Several older poems, such as “Putting in the Seed,” were reworked. Frost was filled with a sense of his own power, and the responsiveness of editors to his new work confirmed these feelings. (Harold Monro, for example, took four of the new poems for his influential magazine Poetry and Drama.) It delighted Frost that much of this third volume was already in his notebooks, ready to be harvested.

The last month in England was taken up with packing and final arrangements, which included saying good-bye to many friends. Ezra Pound was not among them, however. Pound’s review of North of Boston, while enthusiastic, had damned just about every other poet in America, and Frost worried that this would count against him when he got back. “I fear I am going to suffer a good deal at home by the support of Pound,” he wrote to Sidney Cox. “Another such review as the one in Poetry and I shan’t be admitted at Ellis Island.”44

There was considerable fear of an impending German invasion throughout Britain, and Edward and Helen Thomas asked Frost to take their son Mervyn, who was fifteen, back with them to America, where he could board with a relative in Alstead, New Hampshire. Helen had written to Elinor that this would be “the kindest of favors in this difficult time.” The Frosts were happy to oblige.

Frost’s feelings toward England on the eve of his departure are best seen in a farewell note to Harold Monro, whose support had been invaluable: “Thanks for everything. I had intended to see you before leaving but at the last moment we go rather precipitously; so that I am scanting duties. Anyway I don’t want too much made of my going or I should feel as if I were never coming back. England has become half my native land—England the victorious. Good friends I have had here and hope to keep.”45

In fact, Frost’s mind and heart were now wholly trained on New England, that magical zone north of Boston which had been the source of so much poetry. He did not know exactly where he and his family would settle once they returned, but the general destination was New Hampshire, where he hoped to find a place high enough in the White Mountains so that his old hay fever complaints would not return. As he told Ernest Silver, he wanted to find “a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier.”46 Nevertheless, the feelings of ambivalence were often overpowering. He said to Haines only a month before his departure: “We are on the move at last after all the threats. Life is once more one grand uncertainty, and I’d not be the one to lament the fact if I was sure I was well.”47

The family left by train from the Dymock station, arriving in Liverpool on the night of February 12, 1915. By all accounts, Frost was deeply melancholy, worried that he was leaving behind the only community that had ever been supportive of his claims to being a poet. The uncertainty of his reception in America weighed heavily, and there must have been considerable anxiety about where and how he would live. On the evening of February 13, the St. Paul departed, with the family lying in their bunks fully clothed, in life jackets. The fear of German attacks on passenger ships was, quite rightly, perceived as real. Indeed, just over two months later, the British liner Lusitania was torpedoed by German submarines and went down, killing over a thousand civilians.