120 PA RT T W O
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
Whydo they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows?We ’re hearing the cadence of self-reliance.
Or take “Birches,” recalling a boy who climbed a slender tree “Up to the
brim, and even above the brim.”
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.Impulsive phrasings barely contain their ten syllables, then the next line pours
over, until the speaker fancies climbing “Toward heaven” but not too far:
Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it ’s likely to go better.A solid maxim, loosened a little by mischief.
“The language is appropriate to the virtues I celebrate,” Frost wrote from
England to an American publisher, aiming like Wordsworth to catch what ’s
heroic and spiritual in common speech. T. S. Eliot, leaving Harvard for En-
gland at the time, was practicing with Anglo-European models. But not Frost.
His next book, North of Boston (1914), opens with “Mending Wall” and runs to
rustic narrative and dialogue. Only “one poem in the book will intone,” Frost
said. “The rest talk.”
“After Apple-Picking” doesn’t lack talk, but its voice strikes dark fantastic
tones.
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there ’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.Extra-long then short lines startle at first, with one leaning word after another:
After, Apple,Picking,pointed,ladder, sticking. Even “heaven” (not just sky)
keeps us off balance. At least the rhyming seems familiar: abbacc. But that won’t
last. No one before had tried such colloquial rhymes: noun with number (“tree
... three”), adverb with verb (“still... fill”), noun with adverb (“bough...
now”). This is not cooked-up rhyming, but common words tuned to rhyme,
and not just single sounds but whole phrases rhyming rhythmically: “through
a tree... two or three,” “Toward heaven still... I didn’t fill,” “pick upon
some bough... apple-picking now.” And Frost ’s run-ons can be momentous