dramatic poems: Lafe in “A Hundred Collars,” Tofille Lajway in “The Witch
of Coos,” and Baptiste in “The Ax-Helve.” Though not as recognizable now,
in the early part of the twentieth century, French Canadians would have been
regarded certainly as an often despised ethnic minority in New England. What,
precisely, does the hierarchy of civilized and savage mean? Is the “old stone-
savage” really more crude than the narrator of “Mending Wall”? This pre-
carious ethical relationship of qualities which we value as high and low at
once create some of Frost’s greatest dramatic tension. Those regarded as low,
untutored or rustic may bear seductively a subversive form of insight, if not
wisdom.
After he had sent early drafts of the poems of North of Boston in 1913 to his friend F. S. Flint, he asked about the effect of his people, clearly indicating the pleasure he takes in the “contemplation of equality,” without being a
propagandist:
Did I give you a feeling for the independent-dependence of the kind of
people I like to write about. I am not propagandist of equality. But I
enjoy above all things the contemplation of equality where it happily
exists. I am no snob. I may be several other kinds of fool and rascal but I
am not that. The John Kline who lost his housekeeper and went down
like a felled ox was just the person I have described and I never knew a
man I liked better – damn the world anyway.10
Frost’s pastoral dramas dramatize tensions between the hierarchy of rural
and city and, ultimately, the possibilities of harmony in a democracy. Looked
at in another way, Frost puts to the test basic assumptions of cultural difference, communication, boundary and understanding as his characters confront
each other. In “The Code,” “A Hundred Collars,” and “The Mountain,” rural
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characters of baffling intelligence subvert the sophisticated assumptions of their interlocutors.
The title of “The Code” would lead us to think that a set of rules or ethics
exists among farmers, and that a town-bred farmer, new to the scene will learn the more obscure limits of the country ways. The opening of the poem reveals a farmer named James fed up and walking off the job while a bewildered, “town-bred” farmer watches, unable to understand what he said or did to precipitate
James’s anger. The narrator sets the scene against a threatening and violent
storm:
There were three in the meadow by the brook
Gathering up windrows, piling cocks of hay,
With an eye always lifted toward the west
Where an irregular sun-bordered cloud
Darkly advanced with a perpetual dagger
Flickering across its bosom. Suddenly
One helper, thrusting pitchfork in the ground,
Marched himself off the field and home. One stayed.
The town-bred farmer failed to understand.
The remaining farmer tries to explain to the “town-bred” farmer what he said
to irritate James. There appears to have been a code against urging the workers on because of the oncoming rain:
“What is there wrong?”
“Something you just now said.”
“What did I say?”
“About our taking pains.”
“To cock the hay? – because it’s going to shower?
I said that more than half an hour ago.
I said it to myself as much as to you.”
“You didn’t know. But James is one big fool.
He thought you meant to find fault with his work.
That’s what the average farmer would have meant.
James would take time, of course, to chew it over
Before he acted: he’s just got round to act.”
“He is a fool if that’s the way he takes me.”
The other farmer, also a “local” or “country” farmer, appears sympathetic to the
“town-bred” farmer, suggesting that he, of course, did not mean to find fault
and would not have intended what “the average farmer would have meant.”
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On the other hand, he depicts James as having thought about it before acting.
What didn’t the “town-bred” farmer know? Did James take the “town-bred”
farmer’s meaning as “what the average farmer would have meant”? Was some
boundary overstepped?
The country farmer’s response opens more possibilities even as he appears
to be settling them. He indicates, in fact, that the town farmer did violate a code: not to tell a hand two things, “to do work better or faster.” Worse, he indicates he probably would have acted the same way James did, even though
he did call James “a big fool”:
“Don’t let it bother you. You’ve found out something:
The hand that knows his business won’t be told
To do work better or faster – those two things.
I’m as particular as any one:
Most likely I’d have served you just the same.
But I know you don’t understand our ways.
You were just talking what was in your mind,
What was in all our minds, and you weren’t hinting.”
The avuncular country farmer has gone from agreeing that “James is one big
fool” to saying that “most likely I’d have served you just the same.” Presumably there is a code or set of rules that the “town-bred” farmer needed to learn, that hands who know their business will not be told two things. He gives some
sympathy to the town farmer who “does not understand our ways.” Yet there
may be something funny in his suggestion at the same time that his speaking
what was in his mind was also “in all our minds” and that he, the country farmer, is “as particular as anyone.” Perhaps what is interesting is that he was
“talking” at all, directly and not “hinting.” It raises a question about what kinds of differences are really at stake between the town and country ways. Did the violation of the country code rest in what was said, the way it was said, or that anything was said at all?
The country farmer proceeds to recount a stunning story of his own expe-
rience as a hand working for a man named Sanders in Salem. It would appear
at first to be headed in the direction of a cautionary tale or, at least, something meant to illustrate “the code” or principles he had just articulated about not telling an experienced hand to work harder or faster. This story veers from
the putative “code” he had just articulated. We learn that Sanders works his
hands very hard, while working hard himself, “If by so doing he could get
more work / Out of his hired work.” Sanders clearly drove his hired hands very hard, and we learn almost brutally so: “Them that he couldn’t lead he’d get
behind / And drive, the way you can, you know, in mowing – / Keep at their
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heels and threaten to mow their legs off.” It’s impor
tant to recognize that at this point while Sanders may have been the boss of the hired hands, there is no town–country difference between them. But there is a town–country difference
between the speaker and his town-farmer interlocutor, and we can only imag-
ine that he must be sounding just a little shocked about this little revelation in employer–hired hand relations in the country! He must be especially stunned
after being chastised for perhaps being a little outspoken in what he said about working harder a little while earlier to James. The farmer goes right along with his story, offering almost as a joke to interpret a country term that doesn’t need much translation when the most baffling part of the whole matter remains
unexplained:
I’d seen about enough of his bulling tricks
(We call that bulling). I’d been watching him.
So when he paired off with me in the hayfield
To load the load, thinks I, Look out for trouble.
What happened in the hayfield turned out to be less disturbing than what
occurred while loading hay in the barn. Our storyteller recounts how he had
the “easy job” of throwing hay down into a bay with Sanders, his boss, down
below to catch it. It may not be easy to ascertain what aspect of “the code”
had been violated by Sanders when our farmer describes how he felt Sanders
seemed to urge him a little with his easy job:
You wouldn’t think a fellow’d need much urging
Under those circumstances, would you now?
But the old fool seizes his fork in both hands,
And looking up bewhiskered out of the pit,
Shouts like an army captain, ‘Let her come!’
Thinks I, D’ye mean it? ‘What was that you said?’
I asked out loud, so’s there’d be no mistake,
‘Did you say, Let her come?’ ‘Yes, let her come.’
He said it over, but he said it softer.
Never you say a thing like that to a man,
Not if he values what he is. God, I’d as soon
Murdered him as left out his middle name.
What code, if any, has been violated by Sanders yelling “Let her come”? Was
Sanders crossing so much of a line in urging something that didn’t need much
urging? In saying something that didn’t need saying? Or did the image that the hand makes of there, “the army captain” with the pitchfork shouting orders out of the pit, simply make him an irresistible target of pent-up hatred? Why was
that particular command so intolerable as to produce the injunction “Never
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you say a thing like that to a man, / Not if he values what he is”? Perhaps he was making a joke on Sanders when he made him repeat “Let her come,” because
the phrase then become a provocation for letting “kingdom come” or “letting
all hell break loose.” It turns out he was not just joking about murdering him as he quite literally buries him in hay.
The country hand did not wait around to see what happened to Sanders,
and others fearful that he was dead kept his wife out of the barn while they dug him out. The hand finds him alive slumped in his kitchen, “slumped way down
in a chair, with both his feet / Against the stove, the hottest day that summer.”
Sanders had escaped, deeply humiliated “. . . but my just trying / To bury him had hurt his dignity.” At this point, one may ask, does this tell us anything
about a code? Was what the hand did justified? Would one expect Sanders to
react the way he did? The town farmer asks the expected uncomprehending
question of the hand which is followed by the equally baffling answers that
conclude the poem:
“Weren’t you relieved to find he wasn’t dead?”
“No! And yet I don’t know – it’s hard to say.
I went about to kill him fair enough.”
“You took an awkward way. Did he discharge you?”
“Discharge me? No! He knew I did just right.”
In the context of “town” logic and “town” right none of what the country
hand has told him has made much sense at all. The narrative that followed his
outlining of the two rules hardly conforms to the measure of that code or any
other code. Any code that could be understood between Sanders and his hand
certainly veered on the edge of violence and civility, the funny and the sinister.
If the town farmer has sought to understand country ways, the joke may be that the boundaries in power relations remain precarious at all moments. Violence
can and will erupt at the least provocation, particularly when one set of men
has authority over another set. The town farmer cannot seem to understand
this elusive code in his search for rules and order.
Fear, threat, and lack of comprehension across boundaries of sophisticated
and rural also inform both “A Hundred Collars” and “The Mountain,” the latter, one of Frost’s meditations on Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence.”
In Wordsworth’s pastoral, a wanderer comes upon a leech-gatherer who saves
him from his obsessions. Wordsworth compares the leech-gatherer to a stone,
a pure and purifying elemental force of nature:
As a huge stone is sometimes seen to lie
Couched on the bold top of an eminence;
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Wonder to all who do the same espy,
By what means it should thither come, and whence,
So that it seemed a thing endowed with sense:
Like a sea-beast crawled forth, that on a shelf
Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself. –
Though Wordsworth regards the leech-gatherer as a lowly figure, he neverthe-
less sees in his rustic labor and in his speech loftiness and dignity:
His words came feebly, from a feeble chest,
But each in solemn order followed each.
With something of a lofty utterance drest –
Choice word and measured phrase, above each
Of ordinary mean; a stately speech,
Such as grave do in Scotland use,
Religious men, who give to God and man their dues.
The leech-gatherer embodies both high and low qualities, rising above the
ordinary and the feeble in his speech; and that makes him a compelling figure.
The farmer encountered by the narrator-wanderer in Frost’s “The Mountain”
is far more elusive and strange than almost any rustic figure in Wordsworth. He encounters him as part of the stark, flinty landscape defined by the mountain: When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, river, and beyond, more fields.
The river at the time was fallen away,
And made a widespread brawl on cobble stones;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.
I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
And there I met a man who moved so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no harm to stop him altogether.
The passage evokes an almost magical entrance into an unknown or hitherto
unseen world by an ex
plorer. The phrase “It seemed no harm” expresses a slight undercurrent of fear on the part of the narrator in encountering a figure he
does know and may not understand very well.
As it turns out, the narrator learns that he’s slightly lost on his “sojourn,”
as he learns from the farmer that he is in “Lunenberg,” which is not quite a
town or village but only “scattered farms” that amount to sixty voters and are completely defined by the presence and ecology of the mountain. In short, they are a strangely isolated community. The dialogue that follows between them
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perplexes the narrator, and probably most readers, because of the farmer’s
playfulness and sophistication, as well as his apparent lack of interest in what is on the summit of the mountain. The farmer beguiles, if not teases, the narrator first by hinting that he’s never been up to the top of the mountain, only the sides for trout fishing. Then he teases him further about a brook with its source on the summit with the intriguing facts about its temperatures. He also reveals remarkable eloquence in describing the imagined winter steam and frost:
“But what would interest you about the brook,
It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.
One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox’s breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch deep with the frosty spines and bristles –
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!”
Our narrator-wanderer may be baffled or have his mind on grander vistas.
He responds to this eloquent vision of the steamy brook with his hope for a
great view. His narration then moves to viewing the mountain vegetation as it
may move above the tree line, to be scaled and cleared to the top. The farmer
softly returns to the less lofty matter of the brook. This drama becomes pastoral dialogue about what kinds of things may be important. The narrator appears
only fascinated by the climb and the grand view; the farmer more by the simple fact of the spring and common source:
“There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain – if it isn’t wooded
Clear to the top.” I saw through leafy screens
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow,
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up –
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 13