material. I have the following poems in something like shape for my
next book:
1. The Death of the Hired Man – an elegy
2. The Hundred Collars – a comedy
3. The Black Cottage – a monologue
4. The Housekeeper – a tragedy
5. The Code – Heroics, a yarn
6. The Mountain, a description
7. Arrival Home, an idyl
8. Blueberries, an eclogue
But variety of material will not excuse me for lack of it in treatment.9
He continued to publish these dramatic eclogues and georgics in his subse-
quent books – Mountain Interval, New Hampshire, and West-Running Brook –
though those subsequent volumes contained many more shorter lyrics. In fact,
North of Boston has only one lyric that “intones,” namely “After Apple-Picking.”
Their characters inhabit a local world little known and not readily accessible to all readers, even if the ultimate insights into their suffering radiate out and touch a much greater human world. The form of these longer poems varies
from appearing as strongly dramatic with significant though relatively subtle
intrusion of the narrator, such as “Home Burial,” “The Fear,” or “The Death
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
“Men work together”
65
of the Hired Man,” to poems that work as hybrids of narrative, drama, and
dialogue with several voices, such as “Snow” and “The Self-Seeker,” or dra-
matic narratives in which the narrator may play a significant role, such as “The Housekeeper,” “The Grindstone,” “The Ax-Helve,” or “A Fountain, a Bottle,
a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books.” Frost also wrote a number of stunning
narrative poems and dramatic monologues, such as “Paul’s Wife,” “The Pau-
per Witch of Grafton,” and, perhaps best of all, “A Servant to Servants.” The
nuances of the forms of these poems, the way they tell stories and reveal characters, and from which emerge moments of elevated lyric tell us a great deal about Frost’s full sense of the poetic universe, one which is always charged by the give and take of human relationships, the desirability of maintaining boundaries,
as well as our ultimate inability to maintain them.
The drama often centers on an object which becomes a synecdoche or form
teasing or drawing out the relationships between the speakers or conflicting
characters of the poem. Their ability to understand that thing – a tuft of flowers, a wall, a cellar hole, an ax-helve, a grindstone, a brook, or a house or home itself –
becomes inextricably bound to their ability to understand one another. The
poems penetrate to the limits of individuality and the demands of community
in the creation of meaning. Frost’s dramatic poems often allow outsiders to
“see what we were up to sooner and better than ourselves,” as the characters
move each other and us subtly toward psychological revelation:
The ruling passion in man is not as Viennese as is claimed. It is rather a
gregarious instinct to keep together by minding each other’s business.
Grex rather than sex. We must be preserved from becoming egregious.
The beauty of socialism is that it will end the individuality that is always
crying out mind your own business. Terence’s answer would be all
human business is my business. No more invisible means of support, no
more invisible motives, no more invisible anything. The ultimate
commitment is giving in to it that an outsider may see what we were up
to sooner and better than we ourselves . . . Every poem is an epitome of
the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements.
( CP, 147–148)
As an artist, Frost sought to capture the human voice as a means to under-
standing drama. “I like the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it,” he wrote in 1914, discussing the importance of tones of speech, “Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy . . . gives the thrill of sincerity. A story must always release a meaning more readily to those who read than life itself as it goes
ever releases meaning” ( SL, 159). As he moved from A Boy’s Will to his second book, he originally thought of calling it “New England Eclogues” ( SL, 89). In an
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
66
Works
unpublished expanded preface to North of Boston, Frost reiterated his interest in Virgil, noting that the book
was written as scattered poems in a form suggested by the eclogues of
Virgil. Beginning with one about Julius Caesar in the year I was reading
about Aenius and Meliboeus, luckily (I consider) in no vain attempt to
Anglicize Virgil’s versification, dactylic hexameter. It gathered itself
together in retrospect and found a name for itself in the real estate
advertising of the Boston Globe . . . Some of them are a little nearer one act plays than eclogues but they seem to have something in common
that I don’t want to seek a better name for. I like it’s being locative.
( CPPP, 849)
Frost explored the intimacy of human psychology and the tensions between
labor and contemplation as well as the anxiety of human inequality and strife
in an idyllic and remote world.
One sees the highly dramatic impulse in all of Frost’s lyrics. But the desire of one farmer to speak deeply to the heart of another and to challenge boundaries of solitude and power becomes a definite theme in the early lyric of A Boy’s Will, “The Tuft of Flowers.” The loneliness or perhaps solitude of the mower’s
“scythe whispering to the ground” in “Mowing,” becomes the impetus for a
meditation on the community of labor in “The Tuft of Flowers.” The speaker, a
farmer who rakes hay, imagines that the mower has spared the flowers because
he, too, recognizes their value beyond the grass that must be cut down. By
chance, a butterfly, seeking nectar, draws the speaker’s attention to the flowers, and he hesitantly imagines why they had been spared:
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of grass flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
By simply imagining the mower’s “sheer morning gladness at the brim,” the
speaker can perceive, though not state, “a message from the dawn,” and can
hear the mower’s “long scythe whispering the ground” and “feel a spirit kindred
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
“Men work together”
67
to my own.” No longer feeling that men are inevitably “alone,” “whether they
work together or apart,” the speaker can imagine a dialogue of “brotherly
speec
h”:
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”
The couplets underscore the poem’s general theme of coupling and of bringing
together in the imagination those who seemed isolated as well as the disasso-
ciated worlds of work and contemplation in the heart of the speaker.
In a prefatory note to the first edition of North of Boston, Frost alerted readers that the keynote poem, “Mending Wall,” picked up on themes first laid down
in “The Tuft of Flowers.” The provocative note points to an aspect of the poem that can be overlooked in overeager moral or political readings of it, namely, that there are two laborers who understand each other “whether they work
together or apart.” Readers will often remember “Mending Wall” for either
one of its two main aphorisms but not both of them. It begins with “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” spoken by the narrator. It ends with “Good fences make good neighbors.” Both sayings are repeated by the narrator twice
in the course of the poem. It would be na¨ıve to say that either view is Frost’s, and Frost did actually leave quite a bit of significant evidence in his notebooks, poems, and interviews to suggest that he viewed the matter, so to speak, from
both sides of the fence. But Frost warned against reading himself into any one of the characters: “I make it a rule not to take any ‘character’s’ side in anything I write,” he cautioned Sidney Cox in a 1914 letter discussing “The Black Cottage”
( SL, 138).
Frost himself later published poems – “A Cow in Apple Time” and “Triple
Bronze” – that, taken in the context of “Mending Wall,” make any simple
ethical reading of it problematic. In the Clearing contains the couplet “From Iron,” “Nature within her inmost self divides / To trouble men with having to
take sides.” Frost also said in his notebooks: “All life is cellular physically and socially” and also “One chief disposition in life is cell walls breaking and cell walls making. Health is a period called peace in the balance between the two.
Sickness a period of war” ( N, 280–281). In an interview Frost added: “We live by the breaking down of cells and the building up of new cells. Change is constant and unavoidable. That is the way it is with human beings and with nations, so
why deplore it?” ( I, 179). Cells both contain within themselves and build into larger units; their walls are barriers but also permeable thresholds and points of
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
68
Works
division. Looked at from this plane of figurative regard, “Mending Wall” may
have greater possibilities than the perspective of the narrator.
The rhetorical strength of the speaker of “Mending Wall” makes a crafty, wise
case for openness against what appears to be the crude creator of barriers and boundaries. The speaker betrays his own rhetoric several times in the course
of trying to be persuasive in ways that make one wonder. For one thing, the
speaker lets the neighbor know that it is time to fix the wall: “I let my neighbour know beyond the hill; / And on a day we meet to walk the line / And set the
wall between us once again. / We keep the wall between us as we go.” At this
moment, the speaker and his neighbor may be separated by the membrane of
the wall but they are also brought together by it at the same time. The fact
remains that the wall gets “repaired” annually as much as the speaker becomes
“re-paired” with his antagonist.
Does the speaker hope for a utopian world without boundaries? When he
describes his neighbor as an “old stone savage armed” who “moves in darkness
as it seems to me / not of trees only” his worst crime may be an inability to think and to renew language, “to go behind his father’s saying.” But the speaker also repeats his saying “something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” What is that
“something”? He insists that it should be left unsaid. The speaker does show
particular disaffection for the obvious or crude. “I could say Elves’ to him, /
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather / He said it for himself.” The speaker’s aside early in the poem about the hunters reveals a good deal about his own
pleasure in concealment:
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
When they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.
We may ask here whether “the work of hunters,” which presumably participates
in the general work that includes mending walls, is something entirely other
from the ice that breaks up the wall – another thing altogether – or just another thing. He calls what the hunters do “work,” yet as if to belittle the annual process of rebuilding the wall or perhaps his neighbor’s enthusiasm for it, he calls the process “. . . just another kind of out-door game, / One on a side. It comes to little more.” All this work may also be play. And all that may be culture may also be nature. If so, then a reader should not be too ready to assume an opposition between nature and human nature. The narrator, in the case of the hunters,
on repairing the wall, not leaving it down. Why? Only because the hunters
destroyed it? He seems to have contempt for their desire to “have the rabbit out
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
“Men work together”
69
of hiding” and, worse, “to please the yelping dogs.” Lack of subtlety, complete openness, and literalness seem worse offenses than perpetual dialogue. Yet he
insists on drawing out his rather laconic neighbor and on putting notions in
his head. There may be something to the fact that the final utterance of the
poem is the neighbor’s “Good fences make good neighbors,” with some strange
recognition that it is one of two truths in conflict that cannot and do not have to be resolved. “Life is that which beguiles us into taking sides in the conflict of pressure and resistance, force and control. Art is that which disengages us to concern ourselves with the tremor of the universal deadlock” ( N, 168). Frost wrote of poetry: “Your Fist in your hand. A great force strongly held. Poetry is neither the force nor the check. It is the tremor of the deadlock” ( N, 265).
One could see that both hunters and frozen groundswells (frost) are things
that subvert walls. It would be something of a problem to say which side Frost himself was on or whether he truly appealed to nature. His notebook writings
reveal how complex and shifting his thinking on these matters really was. One
entry succinctly pits nature against humanity with the individual ordering force between the two:
Nature is a chaos. Humanity is a ruck. The ruck is the medium of kings.
They assert themselves on it to give it some semblance of order. They
build it into gradations narrowing upward to the throne. There are
periods of felicity when the state stands [lasts] for a reign and even two
or three reigns or a dynasty. The people are persuaded to accept their
subordinations. But the ruck is a discouraging medium to work in.
Form is only roughly achieved
there and at best leaves in the mind a
dissatisfaction and a fear of impermanence and a relative confusion. It is
always as transitional as rolling clouds where a figure never quite takes
shape before it begins to be another figure. Contemplation turns from it
in mental distress to the physicians. The true revolt from it is not into
madness or into a reform. It is onward in the line projected by nature to
human nature and so on to individual nature. It is the one man working
in a medium of paint words or notes – or wood or iron. Nothing
composes the mind like composing composition. Let a mere man
attempt no more than he is meant for. Other men are too much for him
to count on organizing. Let him compose words into a poem.
( N, 46)
Frost does not appeal to nature as Emerson or Wordsworth might have done,
at least in this passage. Here it represents the incessantly formless. Frost also regards “humanity” as a “ruck,” a pile or another form of chaos. Either way,
this perspective does not align readily with the more liberal and social rhetoric of the phrase of “even two can pass abreast” or the wall-subverting mischief of the speaker of “Mending Wall.” If anything, Frost would seem to be arguing
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
70
Works
for the making of some simple form of order against chaos, somewhat closer
to the wisdom of “Good fences make good neighbors.” On the other hand,
Frost seems acutely aware and attuned to the fact of waste in the world, a fact which he sees complementary to the creation of order. The movement from
the raw formlessness of nature into form remains only temporary in Frost’s
imagination.
Tension about human hierarchy and human equality remains an important
aspect of “Mending Wall” but it becomes an unquestionably strong theme
throughout Frost’s dramatic poems. When the narrator calls his neighbor
“an old stone-savage armed,” he turns his wall-building into an anthropolo-
gical, if not racial, fantasy. The character was apparently based on Frost’s French Canadian neighbor, Napoleon Guay. Though nothing in the poem indicates
that he was French Canadian, several French Canadian figures appear in the
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 12