ROBERT FROST AND THE FUN IN HOW YOU SAY A THING 119There he read more Thoreau: “I went to the woods because I wanted to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” Frost had his students at a
local academy read Walden aloud, and he seconded Thoreau’s hope for “a poet
who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him;
who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the
spring, which the frost has heaved.” At Derry he found what his poems would
need, the “sound of sense,” ingraining measured verse with natural speech.
Chopping wood in his yard one day, he feels someone behind him who “caught
my ax expertly on the rise.” His neighbor, denouncing machine-made handles,
offers one he himself has hewn:
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work.There, with no false curves, lay the strength of Frost ’s writing in the American
grain.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, he nailed down his American idiom after moving
to England, where he ’d broken away with his family in 1912. To release “the
vitality of our speech” (Frost wrote his favorite Derry student), a poet “must
learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their
irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.” A few months later:
“The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax
idiom and meaning of a sentence.” And yet again: There is the “regular pre-
established accent and measure of verse,” and the “irregular accent and measure
of speaking intonation,” natural rhythm. “I am never more pleased than when
I can get these into strained relation.”
It sounds as if a wild pony’s being lassoed: “breaking,” “entangled,”
“strained.” Such is the sound of sense, for Frost. “If it is a wild tune, it is a
poem”—wild, yet a tune. Neither loose freedom nor tight form will do, for
American speech. Clearly the poet ’s as taken with the task of saying as with
what gets said. “But all the fun’s in how you say a thing,” he says, and we always
almost believe him.
In England Frost wrote out of homesickness for New England. “Mend-
ing Wall” sets sound and sense against restriction, letting colloquial phras-
ing accent the first syllable, then easing into an iambic beat: “Something there
isthatdoesn’t loveawall.” Against his neighbor’s “Good fences make good
neighbors,” a casual rhythm breaks iambic pattern, freeing up the poet ’s
tongue: