“The Death of the Hired Man” gives us the indirect portrait of a homeless
figure, Silas the hired man, as well as a married couple, Mary and Warren,
whose discussion over his return and impending death becomes a philosophical
dialogue about the nature of home and the extent of human relations. Frost’s
own comments about the poem in his 1960 Paris Review interview tend to simplify the poem by turning the gendered voices into political allegory:
They think I’m no New Dealer. But really and truly I’m not, you know, all
that clear on it. In “The Death of the Hired Man” that I wrote long, long
ago, long before the New Deal, I put it two ways about home. One would
be the manly way: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.” That’s the man’s feeling about it. And then
the wife says, “I should have called it / Something you somehow hadn’t
to deserve.” That’s the New Deal, the feminine way of it, the mother way.
You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your
father’s. He’s more particular. One’s a Republican, one’s a Democrat.
The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother’s
always a Democrat. Very few have noticed the second thing; they’ve
always noticed the sarcasm, the hardness of the male one.
( CPPP, 885)
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It may be that Frost is constructing an overlay of political allegory on one of his most widely anthologized poems to combat the reputation that haunted
him then and continues to trouble his legacy: his questioning of the New Deal
and his perceived skepticism of egalitarianism. For this reason, he may be
overemphasizing (as well as oversimplifying) the complexity of voices in this
and many of the other domestic poems.
In “The Death of the Hired Man,” Mary and Warren may complement each
other as much as critics have found them vocal and ethical opposites. Mary
reports to Warren that since returning to the farm, Silas has been rambling
on about Harold Wilson, the young boy he once worked with at the farm. As
she describes this, it could be said that Mary sees some of herself in Silas – an underdog finding the right arguments too late. Embedded within the story is
Harold Wilson himself and his interest in Latin and the violin for its own sake.
Mary appears mocking this form of sophistication and knowledge for its own
sake, even though Silas himself appears little better in accomplishment. Warren may only be concerned that his hired man will simply wander off again. One of
the most powerful moments in the poem comes in the way Mary and Warren
complement each other in dialogue, as Mary speaks openly that Silas has come
to them to die, and that he regards them as family and home:
“Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”
“Home,” he mocked gently.
“Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.”
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
In describing Silas as coming home and then in conceding somewhat to her
husband’s gentle mocking, Mary generates a dialogue about home that does
not reconcile opposites but keeps them within viable tension.
Intrusion, isolation, and eventual madness all contribute to the fragility of
home and the tensions between men and women within the home. It may
be impossible to determine what precisely lies at the root of the struggle for power and the fear of loss and change generated within poems such as “The
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Hill Wife,” “The Witch of Coos,” or “The Fear.” In “The Fear,” Frost creates
a stunning dramatic narrative of uncertainty; the precise nature of “the fear”
never becomes definite. Joel and his wife, if she is his wife, throw shadows
outside the farmhouse. She intimates, if not insists that she saw someone and
there is yet further suggestion that it is someone with whom she had some kind of history:
“It’s not so very late – it’s only dark.
There’s more in it than you’re inclined to say.
Did he look like–?”
“He looked like anyone.
“I’ll never rest tonight unless I know.
Give me the lantern.”
“You don’t want the lantern.”
She pushed past him and got it for herself.
“You’re not to come,” she said. “This is my business.
If the time’s come to face it, I’m the one
To put it the right way. He’d never dare –
Listen! He kicked a stone. Hear that, hear that!
He’s coming towards us. Joel, go in – please.
Hark! – I don’t hear him now. But please go in.”
“In the first place you can’t make me believe it’s –”
“It is – or someone else he’s sent to watch.
And now’s the time to have it out with him
While we know definitely where he is.”
Frost creates an intricate dance of dramatic escalation; both Joel and his wife contribute to elevating the tension; Joel by denying any possibility of its being the man his wife thinks it is and she both insisting that he would never dare
confront them and that she alone must handle the confrontation.
When the encounter comes it leaves many questions unresolved and bril-
liantly heightens the tension. She approaches the voice, and then he emerges.
It remains uncertain both what she sees and who, if anyone, she recognizes:
And then the voice again: “You seem afraid.
I saw by the way you whipped up the horse.
I’ll just come forward in the lantern light
And let you see.”
“Yes, do. – Joel, go back!”
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She stood her ground againt the noisy steps
That came on, but her body rocked a little.
“You see,” the voice said.
“Oh.” She looked and looked.
“You don’t see – I’ve a child here by the hand.
A robber wouldn’t have his family with him.”
“What’s a child doing at this time of night?”
“Out walking. Every child should have the memory
Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.
What, son?”
We still cannot be sure from the man’s cryptic comments of his relationship
to the woman. The narrative observations about her looking followed by his
statement that she does
not see echoes Amy’s criticism of her husband’s “blindness” in “Home Burial.” The conclusion of the poem demands that we remain
unassuming, for we cannot be sure why she is calling out to Joel or what has
happened to him or what is or may be about to happen in her encounter with
this mysterious man:
“But if that’s all – Joel – you realize –
You won’t think anything. You understand?
You understand that we have to be careful.
This is a very, very lonely place.
Joel!” She spoke as if she couldn’t turn.
The swinging lantern lengthened to the ground,
It touched, it struck, it clattered and went out.
Did Joel’s wife intensify fear as a form of psychological manipulation? Or did the man from the road turn out to be either someone she expected from her
past or, if not, someone equally, if not more menacing? Frost’s drama cultivates the terror of the uncertainty.
It would be wrong to view Frost’s women, as a few critics have, as neurotics
or purely wild. Their suffering in no way diminishes their capacity either to
control, to be playful, or to perceive a reality which the poetry suggests is
elusive but still there, palpable, and often menacing. Without question that
reality must be judged from the perspective of the speakers, who prove to be
enormously seductive, if often baffling and sad. “A Servant to Servants” shows Frost working in another poetic form – the dramatic monologue – giving
particular poignancy to the speaker’s domestic and emotional predicament.
A recurring phrase of the speaker’s “But I don’t know” becomes the resonant
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assertion of uncertainty of a self caught between the isolation and demands of domestic labor and the fear and hopelessness of inherited madness. The title
echoes a phrase from Genesis 9: 25, the curse given to Ham, the son of Noah,
for seeing his father naked: “a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.”
Why would Frost be echoing such a thing in this instance? One reason may
have to do with the speaker’s audience. This is a woman speaking to women, a servant to servants. In that sense, she is telling women something about the condition of women, and the title becomes a subtle extra-poetic commentary
on the subject matter of the poem:
I didn’t make you know how glad I was
To have you come and camp here on our land.
I promised myself to get down some day
And see the way you lived, but I don’t know!
With a houseful of hungry men to feed
I guess you’d find . . . It seems to me
I can’t express my feelings any more
Than I can raise my voice or want to lift
My hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to).
Did you ever feel so? I hope you never.
It’s got so I don’t even know for sure
Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything.
There’s nothing but a voice-like left inside
That seems to tell me how I ought to feel,
And would feel if I wasn’t all gone wrong.
We are stunned by the eloquence of this woman but can well imagine how
stunned her audience must be within the dramatic context of the poem. They
are likely botanizers, as we learn later when she asks them how they learned
of Lake Willoughby, “In a book about ferns?” At the turn of the twentieth
century, botanizing trips were often for women, though not exclusively. Frost, himself, was, of course, an amateur botanist and would take his family on trips to the Lake Willoughby area to escape hay fever. The audience that hears her
must have been surprised to come upon this woman who begins to tell them
about her broken life, with nothing but a “voice-like left inside.” It changes the mood and context, if we imagine that these temporary campers, perhaps
young women, have not as yet suffered any of the experiences of married life
which she will be unfolding to them in the course of her monologue.
We cannot debate her truthfulness but the quality of her storytelling remains
overwhelmingly compelling. Rather than complain or seem bitter, she gives
wrenching glimpses of the cruelty of her husband, Len. As her story builds, we hear the possibility of madness running in the family, the horrifying story of
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an uncle kept in a cage in her parents’ house and making music from it as a
form of solace, and her fear that she is merely following the cycle:
They tried to keep him clothed, but he paraded
With his clothes on his arm – all of his clothes.
Cruel – it sounds. I s’pose they did the best
They knew. And just when he was at the height,
Father and mother married, and mother came,
A bride, to help take care of such a creature,
And accommodate her young life to his.
That was what marrying father meant to her.
She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful
By his shouts in the night. He’d shout and shout
Until the strength was shouted out of him,
And his voice died down slowly from exhaustion.
He’d pull his bars apart like bow and bowstring,
And let them go and make them twang until
His hands had worn them smooth as any oxbow.
And then he’d crow as if he thought that child’s play –
The only fun he had. I’ve heard them say, though,
They found a way to put a stop to it.
He was before my time – I never saw him;
But the pen stayed exactly as it was
There in the upper chamber in the ell,
A sort of catch-all full of attic clutter.
I often think of the smooth hickory bars.
It got so I would say – you know, half-fooling –
“It’s time I took my turn upstairs in jail” –
Just as you will till it becomes a habit.
No wonder I was glad to get away.
Mind you, I waited till Len said the word.
I didn’t want the blame if things went wrong.
I was glad though, no end, when we moved out,
And I looked to be happy, and I was,
As I said, for a while – but I don’t know!
Somehow the change wore out like a prescription.
We cannot be certain whether the description of the uncle she never knew is
purely fictive, a form of her own imaginative play against the labor and isolation she now faces. The trajectory of the story takes a painful downward turn, an
escape from one “asylum” into another, but her storytelling subtly saves her
for some moments and provides the voice-like order against the chaos of her
life. She may be cursed with madness of a kind but she, like Ham, also exposes
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the nakedness of Len, who appears blind and deaf to the lonely existence as a
servant he has created for his fragile part
ner.
When the narrator of “A Servant to Servants” says “the place is the asylum,”
she resigns herself grimly to state care for the mentally ill. The irony of the colloquial phrase also suggests that her home too has become an asylum in
both senses of the word, a refuge and something of a place of madness. In
Frost’s narrative domestic poems, “home” becomes a metaphor for locating
and grounding the self, for finding origins, and for establishing, ultimately, what it means to be human. More often than not, that drama takes place as
an unresolved sexual conflict, in which a hierarchy of human values appears
continually in debate and in flux. Frost’s concern almost always appears to be with those voices in resistance to authority or, rather, with not allowing one single voice to become authoritative. What can be regarded as authoritative is continually thrown into question as the drama of each poem develops.
Both “The Witch of Coos” and “The Generations of Men” present the stories
of home from the standpoint of what can be imagined from the lost past. The
“witch” or old woman of Coos lives with her somewhat demented older son,
concocting for the narrator of the poem a story about a ghost that rose, bones and all, to threaten her and husband. The old woman, a French Canadian,
also happens to be a spiritualist. But what we find behind the story is one of marital treachery and power. She may have concocted the story of the ghost
to inspire fear or at least some kind of passion in her husband or to rekindle in her imagination the power she once held over the man to whom the bones
belonged. The bones figure in her mind as guilt over her infidelity. The bones, now allegedly nailed in the attic, she tells the narrator, were of a man with
whom she had an affair and whom her husband, Toffile Lajway, killed instead
of her.
Home in Frost’s world always borders on becoming a fragile dream, some-
thing nearly lost that must be constantly brought into being and maintained in the minds of the men and women who live there. In the “Generations of Men,”
two distantly related members of the Stark family, a young man and woman,
meet at a cellar hole that has been proclaimed to have been the original Stark home of years past. In setting the poem, Frost plays on the tourist events held in early twentieth-century Vermont and New Hampshire to try to rekindle interest in the vanishing rural past of New England. This event, a calling together of all members of the Stark family, has been cancelled because of rain. Only the
boy and girl show, and their dialogue both projects an imagined past upon an
obliterated history and reveals the sexual dynamics that would make a future
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 18