ROBERT FROST AND THE FUN IN HOW YOU SAY A THING 117troublings over mortality and divinity. Shakespeare ’s plays gave him the vigor,
the rightness of getting human speech into blank verse, iambic pentameter. Also
Hardy’s novels “taught me the good use of a few words.”
What drove Frost was the absolute value of making poems matter, and fuel-
ing that drive was personal pain: his father’s death, his grandparents’ sternness,
his mother’s hard times as a teacher. Since childhood he ’d felt insecure about
his own worth, sensitive to affront, jealous of anyone who might outdo him,
even of his betrothed, who also wrote poems and was his co-valedictorian.
After school she kept putting off marrying him, until in 1894 he did something
desperate. In one day, by train and steamer and foot, he got himself south to the
Virginia–North Carolina border and started walking mud roads near a canal into
the jungly, snake-infested Dismal Swamp, trying to throw his life away. Toward
midnight he stumbled on a canal boat, and for a dollar they took him out of the
swamp. Walking, hopping freight cars, taking a night in jail and working for a
few days, eventually he wrote his mother for rail fare and returned home after
twenty-four days. A year later he and Elinor married.
With his wife pregnant in rural New Hampshire, Frost would wander in
search of flowers for her. Botanizing started, that summer of 1896, with a poem
called “The Quest of the Orchis”: “I skirted the margin alders for miles and
miles” until “putting the boughs aside,” he found “The far-sought flower.”
Reverence, a keen eye, plus a knack for getting the name and nature of things
into verse, stamped his work from then on.
A decisive turn, the road taken, occurred in October 1900 when Frost moved
to a thirty-acre farm near Derry, New Hampshire, with Elinor and a baby
daughter. Their son had just died from infant cholera. That loss, plus the death
of his mother and a long rough winter, dropped him into despair and worse.
But the farm had everything—woodlot, hayfield, stone walls, pasture spring,
apple trees, wild flowers, berry bushes, paths to cut, west-running brook—
and come spring, his mood picked up. “To the Thawing Wind” says “Find the
brown beneath the white” and “Turn the poet out of door.” “Mowing” catches
“my long scythe whispering to the ground.” Three more children came during
the Derry years. “We were showing the country things to the children as they
came along. We had apples pears peaches plums cherries grapes blackberries
raspberries cranberries and blueberries of our own.” “A Prayer in Spring,”
celebrating orchard, bees, and hummingbirds, concludes: “For this is love and
nothing else is love.”
Even the dreaded onset of autumn prompts a genial prayer, “October,” weav-
ing slow supple lines with simple and surprising rhymes.
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;