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“dalliance,” and brutality mixed with fervor toward his son. During the boy’s
early years his home moved constantly. Yet the still-young city and environs
of San Francisco held plenty to grow on: the peninsula’s neighborhoods, hills,
surrounding waters and islands, ocean dunes, tides, Seal Rocks, and across the
as-yet-unbridged Golden Gate, Sausalito’s harbor, Mount Tamalpais, hills and
woods around Nicasio, Napa Valley fields. An after-dinner family walk below
the city’s Cliff House around 1880 led to his first lines on nature, “Song of the
Wave,” and much later to the “shattered water,” battered shore, and “night of
dark intent” in “Once by the Pacific.”
Frost ’s West Coast genesis ended at eleven when his father died and his
mother took him and his sister east for good. Yankee terrain and temper seemed
cold at first, but Rob and Jeanie came to know southeast New Hampshire: farm,
wood, meadowland, thickets, streams, dirt roads, stone walls, apple orchards,
berry-picking, first snowfall. One winter day Rob filled a thimble with water
and put it on the windowsill overnight. Next morning he tapped out the mold
of ice, set it on a wood stove, and watched it melt. Decades later this gave him
“the figure a poem makes”: “It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.... Like
a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”
Swinging birches, tracking animals, scything grass, tossing hay, becoming
“versed in country things” went along with a passion for reading, history, Latin,
and Frost ’s ventures as editor of his high school paper. He absorbed Emerson on
self-reliance and a poet ’s cheerfulness, which comes from sunlight, air, water,
Emerson said, and “from every pine-stump and half-imbedded stone, on which the
dull March sun shines.” Frost later recalled “first thinking about my own language”
via Emerson: “ ‘Cut these sentences and they bleed,’ he says... he had me there.”
Thoreau primed him too: “A true account of the actual is the rarest poetry.”
In one of Frost ’s teenage poems, “Clear and Colder,” Boston Common looks
bright with the light of day,
For the wind and rain had swept the leaves
And the shadow of summer away.
The walks were all fresh-blacked with rain.That “fresh-blacked with rain” smacks of Thoreau’s “actual.” As a senior, Frost
bought the first two volumes of Dickinson’s poems and read them to his sweet-
heart Elinor.
I reason, Earth is short—
And Anguish—absolute—
And many hurt—
But, what of that?Dickinson’s dry, terse, spoken idiom and slant rhymes hit home, along with her