“Hope against Hope.” This affirmation of the sustenance of the spirit is provided by the very famous American poet, Robert Frost. The story goes back to the Latin era when it was quoted, “Hope nourishes the farmer.” This quotation stems from the elegy of Tibullus, where the poet poignantly explores the feelings of a lover whose “hope” for a future together holds him back from embarking on military service. What sort of “farmer” thrives on the promise of a harvest a century away? To answer, Robert Frost converted this expression of lover or farmer as hope against hope. The sense of indifference or violence of nature, the complexity of relationships through a psychological era, the inside and outside of people, or the devotion of man are easily visible through Robert Frost poems. So, when you read his poems, it always feels that maybe the situation has passed in the past or running in the present. Today, in this article, I am talking about some of famous poems by Robert Frost which I like and relate to in one or another way.
About the Poet: Robert Frost.
Born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, Robert Frost’s father was a native of New England, while his mother was a true Scots woman, who was an emigrant from Edinburgh. Raised as a city boy, in San Francisco, until he was eleven years old, the poet’s life was uprooted when his father died of tuberculosis in 1885.
Robert’s father expressed in his will his desire to be returned to his beloved New England for burial. Understanding the significance of his final wishes, Robert moved there with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to honor his memory. Although they crossed the continent, they didn’t have the funds for the return trip, which led them to settle in the village of Salem, New Hampshire, where Mrs. Frost earned an unpredictable living for a few years by teaching in a grammar school.
When the poet first came to New England, he took pride in being a Californian which brought him a decided hostility towards those reticent Yankees, whose idiom he would honor in his poetry later. It was all sudden that he developed an intense pleasure in learning during his four years at Lawrence High School. After he graduated, in 1892, he enrolled as a freshman at Dartmouth College but soon left as he had had enough of the scholarship. For the next few years, he tried to earn a living without any worldly ambition. He would work in mills in Lawrence, dabbled in newspaper reporting, and taught in school. In all this time, he gave all his leisure time to write poetry. In 1894, he celebrated his first sale of a poem, “My Butterfly” to a prominent literary magazine, the New York Independent.
After he married in 1895, he settled into the routine of school teaching. For more than twenty years, he helped his mother manage a small private school in Lawrence and then spent two years as a Harvard student. However, his health began to decline which is why in 1899, he turned to an outdoor occupation and tried to make a successful life by raising hens and selling eggs. In 1900, his doctor advised him of his recurrent illness as it might indicate tuberculosis. Hence, Robert moved with his family to a small farm in Derry, New Hampshire where he continued the poultry business.
Robert was witnessing failure in everything he was doing. He failed as a farmer and poet as he could hardly sell one or two poems occasionally. During the winter of 1906, he had severe pneumonia, which was a near-death experience but he and the doctor were shocked to see him recover. Having grown accustomed to failure, he finally decided to bet all on poetry. So after selling his farm in Derry, he went to England with his family to write. Much to the relief, his first book A Boy’s Will became very successful.
10 Robert Frost Poems One Must Know About.
1. Stopping By Woods.
The poem is about the poet’s brief stoppage in the snowy evening in the woods, as he gets transfixed by the mesmerizing scenes unfolding. Just when he stays to take a moment to indulge in the naturalistic beauty of woods covered in snow, he is desperate to take a move between staying in the woods or heading home. There are hidden inclinations in the poem which can have a range of meanings. A genuine paradox is seen here, the rivalry between an individual’s will and social commitment. The creative spirit is kept intact when it expends itself in purposeful action. It is important to note that the general appeal was to directly confront the threatening darkness of several natural processes including death. Further, humans are bound to have silence, solitude, and deathlike peace for the positive qualities of beauty and mystery in the scene revealed by a sensitive imagination.
The New Hampshire contained this poem alongside other poems, like Fire and Ice and The Axe-Helve, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
Robert Frost
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
2. The Road Not Taken.
In almost a single sentence, if I were to explain this poem, the poem is simply about the traveler of Frost who is unable to choose both roads, but the critics of the poem enjoy the absolute freedom and diverse routes to comprehend the essence of his poetry. The poem was published first in the Atlantic’s first issue. In The Road Not Taken, there is a presence of optimistic possibilities with a choice in an abstract and irrelevant manner, through the romantically suggestive pastoral arena. Further, there is an ambiguity prepense, which he etched out of a picture, leaving behind several possible approaches. Here he showed the image of a forest and gave two options of the roads.
Furthermore, the poem was inspired by Edward Thomas’ decision to enlist in the British Army and the impact, which comes from his death in action. However, at the sophisticated level, it is just about making a pretense of doing bold things it says it’s doing.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
Robert Frost
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
3. The Subverted Flower.
Being one of the most neglected Robert Frost poems, it is filled with great drama. The drama is about the relationship between a man and a woman with psychological tensions in a single scene, which begins classically in medias res. The theme of the poem is unusual, as it narrates a man’s sexual advances to a girl who is frightened and repelled by them. Another most unusual thing about this poem is that Frost apparently wrote it in early 1913 and he said that he would include this poem in A Boy’s Will, but Mrs. Frost wouldn’t allow it to be published in her lifetime as it might hint at a certain autobiographical basis.
The Subverted Flower is not only about the force of the startling imagery but the psychological exactness with which an action is presented. The scene about the girl “standing to the waist in goldenrod and break,” is pastoral and the reader expects the human relationship, as idyllic. Indeed the man’s exuality is seen through the flower imagery that is natural but also transient and vulnerable. His smile is shy but the girls’ reaction is either out of ignorance or positive unkindness. The entire poem shows psychological projections of terror and disgust that have been the girls’ but when the poet writes, at her mother’s call “from inside the garden wall,” a humiliating self-consciousness overcomes the man, and the sense of shame and disgust transfers to him itself.
She drew back; he was calm:
Robert Frost
‘It is this that had the power.’
And he lashed his open palm
With the tender-headed flower.
He smiled for her to smile,
But she was either blind
Or willfully unkind.
He eyed her for a while
For a woman and a puzzle.
He flicked and flung the flower,
And another sort of smile
Caught up like fingertips
The corners of his lips
And cracked his ragged muzzle.
She was standing at the waist
In Goldenrod and brake,
Her shining hair displaced.
He stretched her either arm
As if she made it ache
To clasp her – not to harm;
As if he could not spare
To touch her neck and hair.
‘If this has come to us
And not to me alone -‘
So she thought she heard him say;
Though with every word he spoke
His lips were sucked and blown
And the effort made him choke
Like a tiger at a bone.
She had to lean away.
She dared not stir a foot,
Lest movement should provoke
The demon of pursuit
That slumbers in a brute.
It was then her mother’s call
From inside the garden wall
Made her steal a look of fear
To see if he could hear
And would pounce to end it all
Before her mother came.
She looked and saw the shame:
A hand hung like a paw,
An arm worked like a saw
As if to be persuasive,
An ingratiating laugh
That cut the snout in half,
And eye become evasive.
A girl could only see
That a flower had marred a man,
But what she could not see
Was that the flower might be
Other than base and fetid:
That the flower had done but part,
And what the flower began
Her own too meager heart
Had terribly completed.
She looked and saw the worst.
And the dog or what it was,
Obeying bestial laws,
A coward save at night,
Turned from the place and ran.
She heard him stumble first
And use his hands in flight.
She heard him bark outright.
And oh, for one so young
The bitter words she spit
Like some tenacious bit
That will not leave the tongue.
She plucked her lips for it,
And still the horror clung.
Her mother wiped the foam
From her chin, picked up her comb,
And drew her backward home.
4. Directive.
The poem begins by going back in time and continues by going back into geological time. It deals more fully and explicitly with the theme of Apollo and Parnassus, in addition to link with the spring of the Muses and Dionysus who shared Apollo’s cult at Delphi. Now, Dionysus like Apollo is a god of music and inspiration, but he is a god of wildness and instinct. You can note the confrontation of life with wildness in other poems of Robert Frost, like, The Most of It and The Demi Urge’s Laugh too. The Muses are goddesses of wild mountain springs- Castalia, Helicon, Pieria.
The poem published in 1946 is based on the theme of spring of the Muses and its attendant imagery of Dionysus and Apollo. In the last two lines of the poem, the poet gives a true salute to Apollo, who is the God of harmony, medicine, and healing of body and spirit. There are paradoxes of poetic aim and diminished achievement in the poet’s writings. In the Directive, the poetic speaker draws an imaginative reader into the mystery at first but ends the pretense with a closing line: ‘Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.’
In Directive, the readers are allowed to take a symbolic journey to an abandoned house, farm, and town, which become different with time. Beyond that, the ledge, woods, and silence have come back into their lives. As we embark on this journey, we engage in an inspiring initiation, responding emotionally to the life that once thrived and has now faded away. We cherish the memories of children’s games and the real house, which has transformed into a nearly vanished cellar hole, signaling the completion of its human purpose. But there is an emotional appeal of lost world to find both destination and destiny in the mountain brook. Further, it tells that we all go through a sentimental sorrow over the past through the lost works to become like brook whole beyond confusion.
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Robert Frost
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of a country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First, there’s the children’s house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring and yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
5. The Lovely Shall Be Choosers.
The poem is a tender and compassionate tribute to the poet’s mother in which her lonely life is seen through seven ironic joys, which she never had in her fate. It is about the woman whose voice was ‘hurled down.’ The ‘downfall’ is her own choosing and it was done by joys but they must “leave her always blameless.” The first joy starts with a wedding, but even that has its issues; something that is known by both of them as reflected in line 24. The second was her grief which was a secret and not known by the world. The third joy degrades even further as it is now public to the entire world, but her former friends don’t care to notice as they are too distant. The fourth joy is about the only ones who will give an ear to the story of “how once she walked in brightness.” The fifth joy is about the new friends, who came into the lady’s life but they would never suspect her greater aspirations towards life. The sixth joy is about self-knowledge and finally, the seventh joy is a joy as she sees herself in pride for what she has become.
The Voice said, “Hurl her down!”
Robert Frost
The Voices, “How far down?”
“Seven levels of the world.”
“How much time have we?”
5 “Take twenty years.
She would refuse love safe with wealth and honor!
The lovely shall be choosers, shall they?
Then let them choose!”
“Then we shall let her choose?”
10 “Yes, let her choose.
Take up the task beyond her choosing.”
Invisible hands crowded on her shoulder
In readiness to weigh upon her.
But she stood straight still,
15 In broad round earrings, gold and jet with pearls,
And broad round suchlike brooch,
Her cheeks high-colored,
Proud and the pride of friends.
The Voice asked, “You can let her choose?”
20 “Yes, we can let her and still triumph.”
“Do it by joys, and leave her always blameless.
Be her first joy her wedding,
That though a wedding,
Is yet—well, something they know, he and she.
25 And after that her next joy
That though she grieves, her grief is secret:
Those friends know nothing of her grief to make it shameful.
Her third joy that though now they cannot help but know,
They move in pleasure too far off
30 To think much or much care.
Give her a child at either knee for fourth joy
To tell once and once only, for them never to forget,
How once she walked in brightness,
And make them see it in the winter firelight.
35 But give her friends, for then she dare not tell
For their foregone incredulousness.
And be her next joy this:
Her never having deigned to tell them.
Make her among the humblest even
40 Seem to them less than they are.
Hopeless of being known for what she has been,
Failing of being loved for what she is,
Give her the comfort for her sixth of knowing
She fails from strangeness to a way of life
45 She came to from too high too late to learn.
Then send some one with eyes to see
And wonder at her where she is,
And words to wonder in her hearing how she came there,
But without time to linger for her story.
50 Be her last joy her heart’s going out to this one
So that she almost speaks.
You know them—seven in all.”
“Trust us,” the Voices said.
6. Into My Own .
The poem revolves around the poet’s adolescent self-dramatization, rates of betrayal, and fear and loss of love. Into my Own is the earliest poem from the poet’s book A Boy’s Will which yields the prophecy; “They would not find me changed from him they knew— Only more sure of all I thought was true.” In this poem, he moves into the vastness of dark trees with a thought. This theme was to evoke an image of a solitary man in a natural world, which was once beautiful and terrifying. The poet further includes both a narrator and a situation, which are distanced so that the narrator doesn’t know what the poem says or how it says. There is a tragic loneliness in this writing through the dark woods but at the end, he pulls himself up and saves the sense of his own precariously.
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
Robert Frost
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
7. Home Burial.
The poem is a dialogue between a married couple with a realistic situation based on the death of the poet’s eldest son due to cholera. One of the highly regarded emotional writings that has almost question-and-answer dialogue form, this poem gives a psychological and realistic insight into family complexities. Not only does it have a conflict but a practical restraint and human depth of complexity with everyday personality. The resulting tension or balance sustains the conflict and deepens it in the poem, which makes the poem more dramatic. The poems of Robert Frost usually move us by the use of language, image, and cadence. And no matter what the superficial external condition, there will always be the inner human condition in his poems. Here, it reflects the inconsolable grief of a dead baby. It tells how the mother of the child mourns after years and she obscurely resents her husband having got over the whole thing so quickly. The poem is about the husband’s resolute unfeelingness and self-involvement, as constituting a very oblique kind of apologia.
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Robert Frost
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: ‘What is it you see
From up there always—for I want to know.’
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: ‘What is it you see,’
Mounting until she cowered under him.
‘I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.’
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,
Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see.
But at last he murmured, ‘Oh,’ and again, ‘Oh.’
‘What is it—what?’ she said.
‘Just that I see.’
‘You don’t,’ she challenged. ‘Tell me what it is.’
‘The wonder is I didn’t see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child’s mound—’
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she cried.
She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm
That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;
And turned on him with such a daunting look,
He said twice over before he knew himself:
‘Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?’
‘Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it!
I must get out of here. I must get air.
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.’
‘Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.
Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.’
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
‘There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.’
‘You don’t know how to ask it.’
‘Help me, then.’
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.
‘My words are nearly always an offense.
I don’t know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught
I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With women-folk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.
Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.
Two that don’t love can’t live together without them.
But two that do can’t live together with them.’
She moved the latch a little. ‘Don’t—don’t go.
Don’t carry it to someone else this time.
Tell me about it if it’s something human.
Let me into your grief. I’m not so much
Unlike other folks as your standing there
Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.
I do think, though, you overdo it a little.
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.
You’d think his memory might be satisfied—’
‘There you go sneering now!’
‘I’m not, I’m not!
You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.
God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,
A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.’
‘You can’t because you don’t know how to speak.
If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice
Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.’
‘I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.’
‘I can repeat the very words you were saying:
“Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretense of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!’
‘There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.
The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.
Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!’
‘You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—
Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you—’
‘If—you—do!’ She was opening the door wider.
‘Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—’
8. Reluctance.
In many of the famous poems by Robert Frost, he uses lyric as old as Greek poetry. However, the most essential charachteristic is its musicality which achieves its musical effects by traditional techniques of meter, rhyme, and stanzaic patterning. Reluctance is based on this technique, he not only exceeded the subject matter of lyric poetry but brought an extraordinary sophistication and originality in the poem. The speaker of the poem remains questioning rather than despairing or becoming too positive. Here, Frost adds no conflict though the persona’s voice is demanding. The poem is in beautifully sustained mood whose effects lies in sweet manipulation. However, at the end, there is a subdued sadness. Since the imagery in the poem is quite traditional, we expect that the speaker might have seen the end of a journey or season. However, there is a longing of returning to metrical regularity at the end stanza, telling that the emotional pivot of the poem is not the end of season but the end of love.
The speaker of the poem youthfully and romantically creates his pose of world weariness in the traditional manner of romantics.
Out through the fields and the woods
Robert Frost
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
9. Mowing.
The time when Frost wrote this sonnet, he was forced to have an inner discipline in his psychological state as there were many events in his life that were creating chaos. For instance, his sister became insane, the emotional stability of his daughter Irma was increasing, and the depressions led to his son’s suicide. Frost was in fact scared of his own desert places as these were all tragic personal evidence of what could follow from the loss of inner structure. Hence, the poem has a deep philosophical message in it.
Mowing is a poem where Frost used dual role of poet and a working farmer. Though the jobs are completely different, the poem finds common ground between two. Beginning with the speaker who describes that there are no sounds around him, the poem then explores what the scythe is trying to say. The line of this inquiry or question leaves his mind. He doesn’t really believe it is speaking. In fact, he says that hardwork should be separate from any fanciful imagination.
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
Robert Frost
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
10. The Death of the Hired Man.
The poem is so famous that not many have neglected to read it. It is another poem by the artist like The Subverted Flower, which is based on dialogues implicating the complex human relationship. It is about a farm couple, Warren and Mary who discussed the return of Silas, an old hired. Since Slias had previously left the farm without informing the couple when their work was in full bloom, Warren appears distant and critical for him for being unreliable. The poem explores the theme of loneliness, psychological disturbance with a tough pragmatism, and laconic humor as their only defense against the harshness of Slias’s life. However, to balance this, Mary puts up some compassion in the poem.
Though there is drama in the poem and a fact that life is uneventful, the depiction of this life convey an intimation of the spiritual reality that transcends into physical reality. There is unbridgeable emptiness in the character’s lives that is devastating.
Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Robert Frost
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. ‘Be kind,’ she said.
She took the market things from Warren’s arms
And set them on the porch, then drew him down
To sit beside her on the wooden steps.
‘When was I ever anything but kind to him?
But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.
‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
If he left then, I said, that ended it.
What good is he? Who else will harbor him
At his age for the little he can do?
What help he is there’s no depending on.
Off he goes always when I need him most.
He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
So he won’t have to beg and be beholden.
“All right,” I say, “I can’t afford to pay
Any fixed wages, though I wish I could.”
“Someone else can.” “Then someone else will have to.”
I shouldn’t mind his bettering himself
If that was what it was. You can be certain,
When he begins like that, there’s someone at him
Trying to coax him off with pocket-money,—
In haying time, when any help is scarce.
In winter he comes back to us. I’m done.’
‘Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you,’ Mary said.
‘I want him to: he’ll have to soon or late.’
‘He’s worn out. He’s asleep beside the stove.
When I came up from Rowe’s I found him here,
Huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,
A miserable sight, and frightening, too—
You needn’t smile—I didn’t recognize him—
I wasn’t looking for him—and he’s changed.
Wait till you see.’
‘Where did you say he’d been?’
‘He didn’t say. I dragged him to the house,
And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.
I tried to make him talk about his travels.
Nothing would do: he just kept nodding off.’
‘What did he say? Did he say anything?’
‘But little.’
‘Anything? Mary, confess
He said he’d come to ditch the meadow for me.’
‘Warren!’
‘But did he? I just want to know.’
‘Of course he did. What would you have him say?
Surely you wouldn’t grudge the poor old man
Some humble way to save his self-respect.
He added, if you really care to know,
He meant to clear the upper pasture, too.
That sounds like something you have heard before?
Warren, I wish you could have heard the way
He jumbled everything. I stopped to look
Two or three times—he made me feel so queer—
To see if he was talking in his sleep.
He ran on Harold Wilson—you remember—
The boy you had in haying four years since.
He’s finished school, and teaching in his college.
Silas declares you’ll have to get him back.
He says they two will make a team for work:
Between them they will lay this farm as smooth!
The way he mixed that in with other things.
He thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft
On education—you know how they fought
All through July under the blazing sun,
Silas up on the cart to build the load,
Harold along beside to pitch it on.’
‘Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.’
‘Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.
You wouldn’t think they would. How some things linger!
Harold’s young college boy’s assurance piqued him.
After so many years he still keeps finding
Good arguments he sees he might have used.
I sympathize. I know just how it feels
To think of the right thing to say too late.
Harold’s associated in his mind with Latin.
He asked me what I thought of Harold’s saying
He studied Latin like the violin
Because he liked it—that an argument!
He said he couldn’t make the boy believe
He could find water with a hazel prong—
Which showed how much good school had ever done him.
He wanted to go over that. But most of all
He thinks if he could have another chance
To teach him how to build a load of hay—’
‘I know, that’s Silas’ one accomplishment.
He bundles every forkful in its place,
And tags and numbers it for future reference,
So he can find and easily dislodge it
In the unloading. Silas does that well.
He takes it out in bunches like big birds’ nests.
You never see him standing on the hay
He’s trying to lift, straining to lift himself.’
‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be
Some good perhaps to someone in the world.
He hates to see a boy the fool of books.
Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,
And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope,
So now and never any different.’
Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard some tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
‘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.’
Warren leaned out and took a step or two,
Picked up a little stick, and brought it back
And broke it in his hand and tossed it by.
‘Silas has better claim on us you think
Than on his brother? Thirteen little miles
As the road winds would bring him to his door.
Silas has walked that far no doubt today.
Why didn’t he go there? His brother’s rich,
A somebody—director in the bank.’
‘He never told us that.’
‘We know it though.’
‘I think his brother ought to help, of course.
I’ll see to that if there is need. He ought of right
To take him in, and might be willing to—
He may be better than appearances.
But have some pity on Silas. Do you think
If he’d had any pride in claiming kin
Or anything he looked for from his brother,
He’d keep so still about him all this time?’
‘I wonder what’s between them.’
‘I can tell you.
Silas is what he is—we wouldn’t mind him—
But just the kind that kinsfolk can’t abide.
He never did a thing so very bad.
He don’t know why he isn’t quite as good
As anyone. Worthless though he is,
He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.’
‘I can’t think Si ever hurt anyone.’
‘No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay
And rolled his old head on that sharp-edged chair-back.
He wouldn’t let me put him on the lounge.
You must go in and see what you can do.
I made the bed up for him there tonight.
You’ll be surprised at him—how much he’s broken.
His working days are done; I’m sure of it.’
‘I’d not be in a hurry to say that.’
‘I haven’t been. Go, look, see for yourself.
But, Warren, please remember how it is:
He’s come to help you ditch the meadow.
He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.
He may not speak of it, and then he may.
I’ll sit and see if that small sailing cloud
Will hit or miss the moon.’
It hit the moon.
Then there were three there, making a dim row,
The moon, the little silver cloud, and she.
Warren returned—too soon, it seemed to her,
Slipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.
‘Warren,’ she questioned.
‘Dead,’ was all he answered.
Other worth-reading Robert Frost Poems includes the Boy’s Will and The North of Boston, which seemed scintillating to me.
Featured Image: A verse of Reluctance by Robert Frost.
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