North of Boston by Robert Frost

First published: 1914

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Like his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913), Robert Frost’s second offering, North of Boston, was first published in England. Despite that it was, and remains, the book that connects the name Robert Frost with America’s New England.

Frost began writing poetry in the 1890s while running a small farm in Derry, New Hampshire, but he found few publications that would accept his work. By the time he took his family to England in 1912, he had published a handful of poems in magazines and newspapers. He was a virtually unknown poet approaching the age of forty.

Frost is seen as a poet on the fringe of the modernist movement from the 1910s through the 1930s. While others experimented with free verse, jazz rhythms, fragmentation, and other nontraditional methods, Frost chose to stick with conventions such as rhyme and meter. His own experiments had to do with the nuances of human speech organized along a poetic line. Frost theorized that it was possible to understand a sentence’s “sound of sense” even if the listener–reader could not make out the individual words spoken. Consequently, his poems sound like talk one might hear between two people—that is, everyday conversation—but talk of uncommon wit and intelligence. Some of the finest examples of that talk appear in the poems of North of Boston. A Boy’s Will presented a speaker who had moved away from the world of people and was observing from a distance. North of Boston, however, is Frost’s “book of people.”

Most of the poems in this volume are dramatic monologues in which one speaker narrates a story, or they are dramatic dialogues in which two speakers act out a conflict. The dialogues depend strongly on tensions to create drama, and Frost presents a great variety of them. “Mending Wall,” the opening poem in North of Boston, is one of Frost’s most famous dramatic dialogues. Two neighbors meet each spring to repair the stone walls that separate their properties. The persona, or narrator, of the poem observes that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (line 1). His neighbor, on the other hand, quotes his father, saying “Good fences make good neighbors” (26) and thus setting up one of the principal tensions in the poem. The narrator feels that his neighbor is too practical, too old-fashioned in his thinking. He says, “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, / Not of woods only and the shade of trees” (40–41). He clings to ideas long held by his people, and to the narrator he is “like an old-stone savage armed” (39). Games and work, the mystical and the realistic, humor and seriousness are tensions that combine to make this poem rich in drama and insight into human nature.

“The Death of the Hired Man” is a longer dramatic dialogue that introduces the reader to a husband and wife, Warren and Mary, who have a problem to solve, and two opposing points of view. Silas, a hired hand, has returned to Warren and Mary’s farm after having abandoned them to work for someone else at harvest time. Silas is dying. Mary argues for making his last days comfortable and to let bygones be bygones. Warren knows Silas to have a rich brother in a town nearby and wants to send him there.

There is very little action in the poem, although the speakers summon up many scenes while talking about the past. Two opposing images form, and the reader is left to choose a side. The use of specific and general language is another source of tension in the poem, as are contrasts of darkness and light, of softness and hardness, and of inside (where Silas sleeps and dies) and outside (where Warren and Mary talk). Each concept is associated with one or the other of the principal characters, but all resolve into a kind of grayness after Silas dies.

The majority of poems in North of Boston are in blank verse, which is defined as unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. (An iamb is a metrical foot of two syllables in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable—for example, the words about and against; pentameter means there are five feet in the line.) The line “And gave/ him tea/ and tried/ to make/ him smoke” from “The Death of the Hired Man” is regular blank verse. Obviously, not all the lines of a poem are equally regular. Frost was a master at substituting other metrical feet to give his lines variety. Frost was influential in establishing blank verse as a twentieth-century poetic form.

Frost was also very fond of word play, which is important for understanding his poems. Metaphors and similes involving games appear often in his poems and in his letters and lectures. “The Mountain” gives good examples of pun, double entendre, contradiction, and other forms of word play. The poem itself provides a clue in the often ignored line “But all the fun’s in how you say a thing” (110). From the moment Frost gives the name of the town—Lunenburg, or crazy town—until he describes a brook that is “cold in summer, warm in winter,” the poem is a runaway ride through a verbal landscape that is the equal of Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. Verbal tensions are one element that keeps Frost’s poems fresh, for new forms of play and meaning can be found even after many readings.

“Home Burial” is a powerful and moving dialogue between a husband and wife who represent the universal conflict between men and women. Like the previous dialogues, this one presents limited action, and the poem progresses almost entirely through conversation. The wife, Amy, feels that her unnamed husband is cold and unfeeling because his mourning for the death of their child has ended and his thoughts have returned to everyday things. The husband, who feels that Amy is protracting her anguish, says, “What was it brought you up to think it the thing / To take your mother-loss of a first child / So inconsolably—in the face of love” (66–68). At a time in history when infant mortality is very low, this might seem harsh and unfeeling. Well into the early years of the twentieth century, however, infant death was a fact of life, and the husband’s attitude may be understood to represent the norm, with Amy’s grief indeed aberrant for the time. Unlike the situation between Warren and Mary, there seems to be no resolution to the conflict for this couple.

Although Frost’s poems can be read as small dramas played out in rural New England, that would be to limit them severely. Nearly all of Frost’s characters, settings, and situations can be recognized to be universally true. Names and places and times are merely ways to localize what is ubiquitous and timeless.

For years, critics interpreted the madness and decay in Frost’s poems as his comment on the disintegration of the New England society he knew. He was making no such comment; rather, he was simply being honest about the characters he portrayed. If there is madness, he seems to say, it is universal.

In the monologue “A Servant to Servants,” the speaker is a woman taking time out from her endless domestic duties to talk to people camping on her land. Her talk begins with local matters but quickly turns to other concerns, specifically her own mental health and a history of insanity in her family. It is a dark, distinctly human story.

My father’s brother, he went mad quite young.Some thought he had been bitten by a dog, . . . But it’s more likely he was crossed in love, . . .Anyway all he talked about was love. (104–05; 108; 110)

In the hands of a less skilled poet, much of the material might have turned sentimental. Frost’s speaker, however, is poignant, not pitiable. She has a clear notion of who she is despite her failing sanity. She is noble and dignified, as Frost’s characters tend to be in the hardscrabble world he witnessed and re-created.

“After Apple Picking” breaks the unrelenting sorrow built by “A Servant to Servants.” It is a meditation on work. Unlike the other poems so far discussed, this one is not in blank verse, employing instead lines of varying length that rhyme irregularly. The persona of this poem is exhausted after days, perhaps weeks, of work. Read on this level, the work offers images and insights that are completely satisfying. However, the speaker gives a clue early on that the poem also seeks to universalize the experience: “My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still” (1–2). That the speaker says, heaven, not sky, is significant. This is a clue that the speaker does not carry the memory—“the pressure of a ladder round”—in his feet from just this harvest but that he is growing old and tired from a long life of harvests. The poem mentions “sleep” or “dreaming” six times (sleep often symbolized death in literature). The speaker is worn out by a lifetime of work and looks forward to his well-deserved rest. This is one of Frost’s several masterpieces.

“The Code,” too, is about work, but this poem examines the unwritten code of conduct between farmers and their hired hands. In a story within the story, a farmer is nearly killed for driving his men too hard. Readers learn that “The hand that knows his business won’t be told / To do work better or faster—those two things” (24–25).

The penultimate poem in North of Boston is “The Wood Pile,” a complex poem that appears on the surface, as do many of Frost’s poems, to be terribly simple. It is, however, full of tension between humans and nature, growth and decay, clarity and confusion. The wood pile deep in the woods seems to have been “cut and split / And piled” (23–24) for no reason, but for Frost, labor is its own reward. He finds it curious that someone would go to the trouble of cutting wood and piling it neatly only to abandon it, but he also knows the satisfaction of a job well done. The wood pile may appear not to benefit anyone, but it benefited the woodsman who did the work. In Frost’s world, that is enough.

Frost’s reputation continues to grow as critics leave aside the public person he became in his later years to concentrate on his work instead. In North of Boston, Frost presents his narrative voice. This, with his lyrical voice, demonstrates his unusual balance of vision and ear. Both voices broadened and deepened in the course of the succeeding collections of poetry to meld finally into one note of exquisite clarity.

Bibliography

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