‘If [when] you read my poem – you heard a voice, that would be to my liking . . . the gold in the ore is the sound.’ Few poets believed more passionately in the sound of sense; few had a more finely attuned
ear to the sense of sound. In Frost’s extraordinary ‘A Servant to Servants’ the woman’s voice is weighted, awkwardly heavy with a life of exhausted love and resignation. The line, repeated, ‘I don’t know’
is in perfect contradictory balance with the familiar beat of her daily rhythm of duty. All is set – in an almost throwaway sequence – against the shattering perspective of family madness. ‘“Out, Out—”’ shocks on every level. It tells the true story of the death of a neighbour’s child in a sawmill, the awful imagery of the boy’s arm leaping away towards the saw, ‘Neither refused the meeting’. The last line is one of literature’s most savage – ‘And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.’ Frost wrote, ‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out’. It was with considerable cunning that he recited ‘Mending Wall’ at an official dinner in Moscow. ‘Mending Wall’ is, on the surface, a poem of simple verities. However Frost, the master of metaphor, was saying something profound concerning boundaries. He had, Heaney noted, ‘an appetite for independence [which] was
fierce and expressed itself in a reiterated belief in his rights to limits: his defences, his fences, his freedom were all interdependent.’ These limits were perhaps essential, and driven by his fear of the abyss. Poetry, Frost once wrote, is a ‘momentary stay against confusion’. Robert Frost fell in love again, after the death of his beloved Elinor, with Kay Morrison, his beautiful, cool, much admired assistant who, alas, was married. Updike notes that it was for Kay Morrison that Frost wrote and recited in public to her one of the most enchanting love lyrics in the language, ‘Never Again Would Birds’ Song be 106 the Same,’ with its glorious last line: ‘And to do that to birds was why she came.’ ‘Two Look at Two’ is about lovers twinned by the vision of a deer and stag, certain that the sighting authenticates their human passion. ‘Acquainted With the Night’ paints a haunting internal landscape. ‘The Road Not Taken’ was inspired by Edward Thomas’s indecision during their walks in Buckinghamshire as to which path to take – a metaphor for life. We end with ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, its iconic last lines oft quoted by Kennedy in his speeches, who had fewer ‘miles to go’ than anyone would have believed possible.