118 PA RT T W O
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.Keats’s autumn ode is not far away. Delaying the seasonal change with six
stresses, “Make the day seem to us less brief,” and balancing loss, “one leaf at
break of day; / At noon... another leaf; / One from our trees, one far away,”
Frost has left Dismal Swamp behind.
The moral of his Derry experience occurs in “The Pasture,” with its hopeful
gesture toward Elinor and us:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to clear the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That ’s standing by the mother. It ’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long.—You come too.He made this the prologue of later books.
Frost would look back on the Derry years as a sacred source of his vocation.
Yet they were not idyllic. Hard put as a poultry farmer, and selling few poems,
he fell into self-doubt, depression, occasional rage—his “inner weather,” as he
put it. Disabling hayfever and pneumonia afflicted him. He and Elinor lost an-
other child at birth, meanwhile his sister suffered in body and mind. Yet with all
this, an “ache of memory” kept him attached to the New Hampshire farm where
indoors and out, he ’d shown the children “sheer morning freshness at the brim.”