The Poetry of Robert Frost

The Collected Poems (selected) of Robert Frost is a prescribed text for HSC English EAL/D Module B: Close Study of Text. Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet of rural New England whose six selected poems set calm country scenes over darker currents of loneliness, doubt, indifference and death.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is one of the most read poets in the English language, and one of the most misread. Born in San Francisco, he is forever associated with rural New England - the farms, stone walls, birches and snowbound woods of Vermont and New Hampshire, where he spent much of his life as a farmer and teacher before poetry made him famous. But Frost is not a comfortable nature poet: he uses the calm surface of country life as a thin skin stretched over darker things - loneliness, doubt, indifference and death.

The prescribed selection is six poems. "The Road Not Taken" watches a walker at a fork in a yellow wood predict the heroic story he will one day tell about an ordinary choice. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" pauses a traveller before woods whose quiet exerts a dangerous pull. "Mending Wall" sets two neighbours rebuilding the wall that both joins and divides them. "Birches" imagines climbing away from earth on bent birch trees, then talks itself back down to the ground. "'Out, Out -'" records a boy's sudden death by buzz-saw on an ordinary working afternoon, and "Acquainted with the Night" walks a rain-wet city street inside a loneliness that has no cause and no cure. Each poem is a short, self-contained scene from the New England world, and each stages the same basic move: a calm, ordinary surface opening onto something darker or unresolved underneath. Two features of craft carry everything - the plain style Frost called the "sound of sense", and traditional form used quietly against the reader.

Frost's most famous theme is also his most misunderstood. "The Road Not Taken" is usually read as a call to take the brave path, but the two roads are worn "about the same", and the speaker predicts that "ages and ages hence" he will claim "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." The real subject is retrospection - the way we rewrite an ordinary decision into a heroic one to give our lives a shape. "Birches" tests the same consoling impulse, letting the speaker dream of escape before the plain avowal "Earth's the right place for love: / I don't know where it's likely to go better" pulls him back to a chastened, earthbound acceptance.

Every poem wears a calm rural surface and hides something darker underneath. In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the woods are "lovely, dark and deep", the three adjectives sliding from safety toward the ominous so a wish for oblivion surfaces without ever being stated, and the repeated close, "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep", is the sound of a man talking himself back into life. In "Acquainted with the Night" the sealed refrain "I have been one acquainted with the night." opens and closes the poem, the interlocking terza rima trapping the speaker inside his own condition.

Frost's countryside is beautiful but never on the human side. In "'Out, Out -'" the buzz-saw "snarled and rattled in the yard" like a predator, a boy's death arrives in the flattest possible language - "Little - less - nothing! - and that ended it." - and the survivors, "since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs." The absence of comment is the comment: the world keeps working, and Frost trusts the plainness to devastate.

His people are alone even when together. "Mending Wall" opens on an unnamed force - "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" - yet the neighbours "keep the wall between us as we go", their shared labour maintaining the very thing that separates them, while the inherited proverb "Good fences make good neighbors." stands unrefuted, so the poem refuses to settle its own argument. Across the selection the orderly rhyme and metre do the same double work: the neat, reassuring form is wrapped around a wound the poem declines to heal, and the gap between the two is where Frost's meaning lives.