O’er ruined fences the grapevines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.
There is an emotional ambivalence about where he is, though it is hard to tell whether from his imagined sense of loss of the house and the lives or from his own estrangement from others:
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
The life in the country bears a memento mori, a remembrance of death, yet even the names have become obscured by growth:
It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
Who share the unlit place with me –
These stones under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
He must, instead, imagine love starting fertile life somehow surviving and
starting anew despite the recognition from the past that the future leads to
oblivion. One wonders what in the speaker’s life would be such, “in view of
how many things,” would make these ghostly companions “as sweet . . . as
might be had”:
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,–
With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.
So many Frost poems meditate upon the fragility of the home, looking synchro-
nically and diachronically into the lives of forgotten and abandoned rural New England. Frost’s focus was particularly poignant as New England farm populations were dwindling rapidly at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning
of the twentieth century, abandoning farm life, and moving increasingly into
urban areas. “Ghost House” strikes a chord that Frost will develop in many
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poems including “The Generations of Men,” “Home Burial,” “In the Home
Stretch,” “The Black Cottage,” “The Wood Pile,” “The Need of Being Versed
in Country Things,” “The Census Taker,” “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s
Ears and Some Books,” and, “Directive.” All of these poems evoke the loss or
abandonment of home, the threat and fragility of human life with extinction,
and the difficulty of country life.
A Boy’s Will provides differing loci amoenae, each erotically charged in a different way. “Rose Pogonias,” takes us far off the civilized path to “A saturated meadow, / Sun-shaped and jewel-small, / A circle scarcely wider / Than the trees around were tall . . .” In this little paradise of a bog has sprung “a thousand” of the delicate “bearded lady” orchids, also known as rose pogonias. The speaker, perhaps with his lover or perhaps with a fellow worker, treats the spot as holy, to be left untouched “in the general mowing,” by which perhaps more is suggested
than the literal harvest:
We raised a simple prayer
Before we left the spot,
That in the general mowing
That place might be forgot;
Or if not all so favored,
Obtain such grace of hours,
That none should mow the grass there
While so confused with flowers.
One might ask of the final line whether the place or the mowers may be the
ones “confused” with flowers. Be that as may be, the orchid came to occupy a
special place in Frost’s imagination. Hardly an unusual preoccupation in the
late nineteenth or early twentieth century, the fascination with orchids became associated with obsessions with rare beauty. Orchid hunters would go to great
lengths to find and preserve rare and beautiful breeds. Frost made a point
that he was interested in wild orchids and not in the cultivation of orchids for sale. But orchids in the nineteenth century also came to represent the scientific aspect of botany. Darwin’s famous study of orchids initiated all those who
studied wild flowers in the knowledge that beauty was part of the engine for
the dissemination of seeds. “Rose Pogonias” has the feel less of something
religious than of submission to the inevitable worship and heat of the erotic.
The steamy bog temple of “Rose Pogonias” has a sultry quality. Seasons cycle
in A Boy’s Will and the possibility of a locus amoenus appears to fade. It may not be the change in season, alone, that produces some skepticism about the
pastoral. The double perspective always appears present in Frost as in “The
Vantage Point.” The sonnet surprises even within the octave: we learn that
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when “tired of trees,” and seeking mankind, he does so at a distance. What he
sees of mankind brings homes into focus with graves:
If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me – in the dawn,
To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
There amid the lolling juniper reclined,
Myself unseen, I see in white defined
Far off the homes of men, and farther still,
The graves of men on an opposing hill,
Living or dead, whichever are to mind.
His restlessness with even this distance turns with the sestet. What kind of
alternative does nature provide? Noonday heat has for centuries been a trope
of the moment of contemplation for the pastoral poet. Here it has the quality of something more actual and empirical: a sun-burned hillside. The poem ends
with three sensuous acts, the last of which appears to call attention to an almost lunar insect analogy to the dwellings of men:
And if by noon I have too much of these,
I have but to turn my arm, and lo,
The sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow,
My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.
Pan had been the classical god of the pastoral world, a figure empowered
through his erotic power and his skill at piping to transform the world around him. In the mysterious lyric “Pan with Us,” Frost depicts the god emerging
from the woods satisfied at the remoteness of the pasture he surveys:
He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
That was well! and he stamped a hoof.
But something causes him to “toss his pipes,” perhaps satisfied with the sounds of birds, perhaps dissatisfied with the remoteness of anyone else to teach:
He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For a sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech
And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
Were music enough for him, for one.
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The elusive and pressing question is what is meant by “a new-world song”? By
“new-world” does Frost mean America and its preoccupations with industry as
opposed to art and play? Or does he mean something more general and perhaps
figurative by “new-world,” one indifferent to thinking about pagan gods in
nature and more about empirical facts, chance, and the “new terms of worth”
of science? The landscape with which the poem concludes no longer seems
fertile but “sun-burned,” and deeply subjected to the forces of the elements:
Times were changed from what they were:
Such pipes kept less of power to stir
The fruited Dough of the juniper
And the fragile bluets clustered there
Than the merest aimless breath of air.
They were pipes of pagan mirth,
And the world had found new terms of worth.
He laid him down on the sun-burned earth
And ravelled a flower and looked away –
Play? Play? – What should he play?
The repetition of “play” in the final line underscores an important aspect
of pastoral thought, the realm of play in opposition to labor and struggle,
“work and play,” “labor and otium.” But Frost’s poetry dramatizes as much the world of labor as it does of play and often seems to struggle to bridge those
two seemingly incommensurate realms. This blending of work and play has
an ancient tradition, too, that extends as far back as Hesiod’s Theogony and, most particularly, to Virgil’s four extended poems about farming, the Georgics.
The Georgics may be about farming on one level but suggest much more about politics, history, and man’s place in nature. In those poems, too, no clear
boundary exists between contemplation and labor. In Virgil’s Second Georgic, he extols the life of the farmer, the explorer-scientists who would investigate the causes of things, and the contemplative who knows the gods of the countryside.
Virgil embraces somewhat the Epicureanism that would form the basis of the
great Roman poem of Lucretius De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of Things.”
Lucretius tends to deflate the romanticized and rustic tales of Pan in favor of naturalized explanations of a completely material universe:
I have observed places tossing back six or seven utterances when you
have launched a single one: with the tendency to rebound, the words
were reverberated and reiterated from hill to hill. According to local
legend, these places were haunted by goat-footed Satyrs and Nymphs.
Tales are told of Fauns, whose noisy revels and merry pranks shatter the
mute hush of night for miles around; of twanging lyre strings and
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plaintive melodies pouted out by flutes at the touch of the players’
finger; of music far-heard by the country-folk when Pan, tossing the
pine-branches that wreathe his brutish head, runs his arched lips again
and again along the wind-mouthed reeds, so that the pipe’s wildwood
rhapsody flows unbroken. Many such fantasies are related by rustics.
Perhaps, in boasting of these marvels, they hope to dispel the notion that
they live in a backwood abandoned by the gods. Perhaps they have some
other motive, since mankind everywhere has greedy ears for such
romancing.7
Whatever diminishment Pan suffers in “Pan with Us,” it may be part of
a worldview that recognizes the difficulty of the landscape and the environ-
ment, the sun-burned earth, the struggle of screeching blue jays or whimpering hawks, or the force of wind and rain. We may also discuss what kind of “demiurge” may be at work in “The Demiurge’s Laugh.” In “Mowing,” perhaps the
most remarkable sonnet of A Boy’s Will, Frost’s pastoral music-making comes through labor. He introduces work as an inextricable part of contemplation
and knowledge. In this particular poem, the work and the sound it produces
are solitary and of the speaker’s own making. Its meaning seems mysterious
to him. The silence, related to the intense heat, and the fact of difficult labor, distinguish this pastoral dream from “the easy gold at hand of fay or elf ” of contemplative rustics.
Frost’s poetry draws the reader into a rustic, mysterious, and, to a large
extent, lost New England landscape. Frost’s New England – particularly New
Hampshire and Vermont – may be both part real and part invented. Place
names – Bow, Coos, Lancaster, Woodsville, and Mount Hor – beguile us with
their literary and mythic resonances. One would not want to say that the
worlds of North of Boston and Mountain Interval are imagined landscapes; Frost’s vanishing, turn-of-the-twentieth-century New England could be recognized by many. But it begins with the local and extends widely beyond itself.
Frost once said that he “first heard the speaking voice in poetry in Virgil’s
Eclogues,” a group of ten dialogues or dramatic monologues of shepherds dwelling in Arcadia, a land of innocence and beauty. Virgil’s Eclogues stand in decided contrast to his great poem of empire and heroic power, the Aeneid.
They also complement another important set of his poems, the Georgics, which appear to be four treatises on farming but which also have allegorical significance, particularly in the realm of politics. Ezra Pound shrewdly called Frost’s poems “modern georgics,” and he no doubt was referring to the overarching
themes of labor and work, usually associated with georgics as opposed to pas-
toral poems or eclogues, which are more often associated with contemplation.
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Was there something political in his choice to write primarily in the pastoral mode? It might be asked why a poet of Frost’s energy and skill did not write epic poetry (a question often asked of modern poets). Frost wrote in the mode of
Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics. In a dialogue with the English Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis, Frost wrote of the significance of the hero in poetry but emphasized what he called “the unconsidered person”:
Day Lewis: And I suppose that anyone who is going to write a narrative poem now has to have the kind of interest in human beings that
often comes out as hero-worship.
Frost: That’s it. It is hero-worship, you see, and one of the things that makes you go is making a hero out of somebody else had never
noticed was a hero . . . You pick up the unconsidered person.
Day Lewis: Yes, and of course that is what gossip does, in a small
community: it makes heroes, doesn’t it – or villains – out of our
neighbors? But they’re big anyway.
Frost: Yes . . .
( I, 176)
Frost thought of the intimacy of gossip about the unconsidered person as a
new way or rather his way of writing narrative poetry about heroes, and many of the narrative poems from North of Boston blend elements of pastoral and georgic traditions to depict these characters.
Writing in the pastoral mode, authors from Theocritus and Virgil to Dante
and Milton as well as Wordsworth and Thoreau have explored questions of
human equality, man’s place in nature, and th
e nature of faith. Though focused on country life or rural life, both pastoral and georgic have long been known
as modes written by and appealing to those of immense learning and sophis-
tication. It should not be surprising that pastoral and georgic modes consider the country from the perspective of those who live in or at least have had some experience of the city. A tension between city and country, innocence of one
kind and experience or learning and sophistication of another, has always been a part of the pastoral and georgic mode.
The pastoral has had an important place in American ideology but by no
means a singular meaning. The puritan pursuit of renewal through rebellion
against ecclesiastical corruption invokes what may be called a pastoral long-
ing for perfection through simplicity. Thomas Jefferson praised the way of
agrarianism, echoing Greek ideals of the independent farmer. Frost’s complex
version of the pastoral does not involve a complete retreat into wilderness (one version), nor a faith in pure agrarianism, nor social reform. He once said,
distinguishing himself from Thoreau’s version of the pastoral: “I am not a
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‘back-to-the-lander.’ I am not interested in the Thoreau business. Only a few
can do what Thoreau did. We must use the modern tools at our disposal”
( I, 78). Shortly after his Collected Poems were published in 1930, Frost affirmed the relationship of his poetry to a fundamental pastoral ideal, the praise of
rustic over urban life:
Poetry is more often of the country than of the city. Poetry is very, very
rural – rustic . . . It might be taken as a symbol of a man, taking its rise
from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes
and then going out into its social appeal and use. Just so the race lives
best to itself – first to itself, storing strength in the more individual life of the country, of the farm – then going to market in the industrial city.
( I, 75–76)
Frost saw an analogy between the development of poetry, the individual, and
the society from the nascent and isolated world of the country to the more
sophisticated or adulterated, world of the city.
The poems may raise questions though of how one should take the rustic
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 10