“TO MAKE IT MEAN ME”: NARRATIVE DESIGN IN NORTH OF BOSTON

STEPHEN MATTERSON

It is easy to think of Robert Frost as the New Critical poet par excellence, and the reasons for this are not hard to see. The canonization of his work was facilitated by the reading strategies encouraged under New Criticism during the 1930s and 1940s.

In spite of the considerable number of longer poems that he wrote, anthologies typically represent his poetry by the shorter lyrics and narrative poems, the kind of work that most readily lends itself to the kind of classroom analysis that New Criticism fostered; the poems are critically amenable to the identification of symbol and the recognition of ambiguity, detachment of tone and to concentration on the autonomous words on the page in the self-contained poem. In contrast to other modernists, Frost’s characteristic avoidance of esoteric allusion lends authority to the words on the page before us and to the poem as if it were the container of all we need to know for understanding. Frost’s poems seem to be mediated to us as individual closed systems and are best understood and appreciated in those terms.

This mediation, though, runs in some respects counter to Frost’s representation of his poetry, and of some of the first (pre-New Critical) critics of his work. Although he certainly maintained that the individual poem was important, Frost also suggested that it might have a “lesser design” than the design of the overall collection in which it appeared. In 1942 Frost explained that he made his first two books, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston by taking the individual poems and then trying to gather them together to reveal a pattern:

The interest, the pastime, was to learn if there had been any divinity shaping my ends and I had been building better than I knew. In other words could anything of larger design, even the roughest, any broken or dotted continuity, or any fragment of a figure be discerned among the apparently random lesser designs of the several poems.¹

Although today’s readers tend to concentrate on the “lesser designs” of the individual poems rather than on the “larger design” of the book, this was not always the case.

Frost’s own contemporaries were alert to his overall design, especially in the first two books. Several of the first reviewers of North of Boston remarked on its prosiness, with some making direct comparisons to regionalist New England prose writers such as Alice Brown and Mary Wilkins Freeman. Clearly these reviewers had in mind the prose-like qualities of the poetry, the subject-matter and the strong narratives that are

1. Frost, “Preface to Poems in ‘This is My Best’”, in Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, New York, 1995, 783.

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evident in most of the poems. But they also referred to the interlinked nature of the poems. As Richard Aldington wrote (in a review Frost disliked), “it is in cumulative effect rather than in detail that Mr Frost gets his results”.²Although none of these reviewers could have known it, when he first moved to England in 1912, Frost had in fact intended to write a novel. The project was abandoned, with Frost saying, “I always found myself writing poetry” rather than prose.³My aim here is not to explore North of Boston as if it were that discarded novel, but to approach the book using a reading strategy that recognizes that it is a cycle of closely related poems, a collection in which each of the seventeen poems functions as an autonomous unit while also contributing to and being enriched by the context of Frost’s overall design. Thus I hope to explore what is gained by such an approach, and, by implication, what is lost if we maintain the sense that each of the North of Boston poems is a discrete unit.

II

Perhaps the closest analogy for this way of reading North of Boston is the short-story sequence or cycle, and it is useful to press this analogy further, and to consider North of Boston as if it were a short-story cycle. The rather critically neglected genre of the short-story cycle has been considered especially American, and has had a strong association with regional and local-colour writers. Typically, a sense of place or region helps to unify the short story sequence, obvious examples being Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), or, to use two prominent recent examples, Richard Ford’s Rock Springs (1989) and Annie Proulx’s Close Range (1999). The relation of North of Boston to the local-colour tradition is evident and made marked by the title Frost chose. More significantly, though, in the short-story sequence or cycle the autonomy of the individual story is upheld (often emphasized by separate publication before its appearance in the sequence), and yet the significance of the story is enhanced or perhaps even redirected by the context in which it appears. As James Nagel has observed:

in the short-story cycle each component work must stand alone (with a beginning, middle and end) yet be enriched in the context of the interrelated stories. In contrast to the linear development of plot in a novel, the cycle lends itself to diegetical discontinuities.⁴

Nagel makes other points that are relevant to North of Boston. He argues that in a cycle each story tends to focus on a specific incident while generating fresh interpretive possibilities for reading the other stories, that although the cycle may focus on a single character it is more likely to involve a series of characters, that there

2. Quoted in Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life, London, 1998, 149.

3. Quoted in Robert Spangler Newdick and William A. Sutton, Newdick’s Season of Frost: An Interrupted Biography of Robert Frost, Albany, NY, 1976, 77. For details of the “discarded novel” see John Evangelist Walsh, Into My Own, New York, 1988, 48. Walsh states that part of the novel was to explore the tension between two farm labourers, one a youthful outsider and the other an experienced older man.

4. James Nagel, The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle, Baton Rouge, 2001, 15.

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is less emphasis than in the novel on the development of character, and that setting has provided the genre’s “most persistent continuity”.⁵

Frost had a strong sense of narrative design, not only for individual narrative poems but also for overall arrangement. This is evident in his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913).⁶The book is divided into three parts of unequal length, and on its contents page Frost included a sub-titular gloss to all but two of the thirty-two poems (the glosses are almost always omitted when the poems appear in anthologies). Thus, for example, on the contents page the title “Mowing”, from Part I has a brief addendum:

“He takes up life simply with the small tasks.”⁷With their use of the third person to create a distance between poet and persona, these short glosses are strongly reminiscent of the titles that W.B. Yeats gave his poems in The Wind Among the Reeds (1899); “The Lover tells of the Rose in his Heart”, “He mourns for the Change that has come upon him and his Beloved, and longs for the End of the World” and so on.⁸ On the face of it Frost’s addenda actually contribute little if anything to our understanding of the poems; they do not, for instance, provide us with any information that is needed to comprehend the poems. They may even appear to be redundant, as, for instance, the gloss on “The Tuft of Flowers”: “about fellowship”, and the fact that the glosses appear on the contents page rather than with the poems reinforces this sense of their redundancy. But these glosses do function significantly in two ways. Firstly, through them Frost implies a consistent persona behind the poems, thus suggesting that this is a collection of poems somewhat unified by the presence of a single character. Secondly, he suggests that there is a form of narrative sequence to A Boy’s Will. This does not necessarily mean that A Boy’s Will tells a straightforward story of its protagonist’s development over a period of time. Frost’s titular glosses function mainly in indicating that the poems explore varying aspects of a single consciousness as his reflective protagonist confronts a crisis. They also work, of course, to indicate that each poem is an episode in a developing drama, even if Frost provides no sense of how this drama is to end.

Frost provided no such glosses to the poems of North of Boston, nor is the book divided into parts as the earlier one was. On the contents page Frost does allude to the earlier collection in his statement that “‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where

‘The Tuft of Flowers’ in A Boy’s Will laid it down” (66). With this, Frost seems to indicate a continuity of persona as well as of place and theme between the two books, but more significantly, he is implying that North of Boston is also a collection of related poems. Interestingly, Frost’s comment suggests the idea of dialogue between poems, an idea that I specifically want to develop. Frost remarked on the genesis of A Boy’s Will, saying that “One day as I was looking at old papers dating back some of them twenty years, I saw in a flash that I had one book already written and all I had to do was throw it into shape to make it mean me”.⁹Frost’s comment that the book came to “mean me” through its arrangement is also telling, even though critical analysis of the poems of A Boy’s Will and North of Boston has tended to ignore this.

5. Ibid., 16-17.

6. That is, his first published book; it is often forgotten that in terms of American publication, North of Boston preceded A Boy’s Will.

7. Robert Frost, Poems by Robert Frost: A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, New York, 2001, 18.

Subsequent references to poems from A Boy’s Will and North of Boston are to this edition and page numbers will be provided in the text.

8. W.B. Yeats, The Works of W.B. Yeats, Ware, xii.

9. Quoted in Sutton, 78.

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III

The first American edition of North of Boston is made up of a total of seventeen poems, although the poems that are placed first and last, “The Pasture” and “Good Hours” are set in italics and are not listed on the Contents page. In fact, “The Pasture”

is printed on the page between the title page and the list of Contents page.¹⁰(“Good Hours” did not appear at all in the book’s first edition, published in Britain; it was added for the 1915 American edition.) “The Pasture” and “Good Hours” effectively frame the book, perhaps functioning as prologue and epilogue even if they bear a slightly ambiguous relation to the other poems. Thus, according to Frost’s Contents page, North of Boston actually comprises fifteen poems. Of these fifteen poems, five (“The Death of the Hired Man”, “A Hundred Collars”, “The Code”, “The Housekeeper” and “The Fear”) had been published before their appearance in the book. Six of the poems (three of which Frost considered the “beginning” of North of Boston) had been written before Frost came to England; the remainder were written there.¹¹Frost did not print the poems of North of Boston in the chronological order of their composition. In the book their order is as follows:

The Pasture 1. Mending Wall

2. The Death of the Hired Man 3. The Mountain

4. A Hundred Collars 5. Home Burial 6. The Black Cottage 7. Blueberries

8. A Servant to Servants 9. After Apple-Picking 10. The Code

11. The Generations of Men 12. The Housekeeper 13. The Fear 14. The Self-Seeker 15. The Wood-Pile

Good Hours

Seeing the poems ordered in this way stimulates several possible ways of looking at North of Boston as a totality. This is partly because accepting that the collection is a kind of sequence or cycle places great importance on the placing of certain poems, especially the first and the last – and, as I shall argue, the middle poem. One of the most intriguing possibilities is in seeing that the dialectic which appears in “Mending Wall” is being taken up and explored in the subsequent poems, in which Frost explores the barriers and connections between people and between their relation to nature, and also explores the limits and possibilities of community and the relation between that community and the past. Thus possible answers to the dilemma of 10. In the 1930 Collected Poems and in subsequent collected editions, “The Pasture” is completely removed from North of Boston and is used to preface the entire collection of poems.

11. See Jeffrey S. Cramer, Robert Frost Among His Poems, Jefferson, NC, 1996, 28-29. The three poems that “began” North of Boston were “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Black Cottage” and

“The Housekeeper”.

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recognizing that “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” but that “Good fences make good neighbours” (67, 68) are not to be found within “Mending Wall” but in the other poems. In some of them, such as “A Hundred Collars”, “Home Burial” and “A Servant to Servants” Frost takes that dilemma to its extremes, and explores the possibility of a complete disconnection between individual people. In other poems, such as “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Code” and “The Generations of Men”

Frost explores possibilities of relationship and community based on accepted and recognized forms of behaviour. Thus, if we start to think of North of Boston as a sequence, and not as a collection of discrete poems insulated from one another, we can see that the situation and the stated problem of “Mending Wall” resonate throughout the book.

In thinking of North of Boston as an integrated book, Frost’s positioning of “A Servant to Servants” is especially notable. Thematically, this is the bleakest poem in the collection, in which Frost represents an isolated woman’s descent into mental instability and suggests an appalling family background. Stylistically the poem also represents a significant shift from the dialogues between men and women that precede it; although the poem includes a character listening to the woman, it is essentially a monologue. In fact, the presence of the silent listener deepens the poem’s tragic intensity, suggesting a loneliness that is irretrievable. This is a woman without community and without the emotional and intellectual means to connect with one.

Even for a poet who was famously characterized as “terrifying” by Lionel Trilling, “A Servant to Servants” is one of Frost’s most uncompromisingly dark poems.¹² The woman’s terrible isolation is deepened and intensified by Frost’s references to familial insanity (the uncle caged in the barn) and the suggestions of some kind of sexual abuse.

The positioning of “A Servant to Servants” at the centre of the book is crucial. It indicates a thematic movement in North of Boston, in which there is a descent to solipsism and silence and then a gradual return to community and life-affirming possibility. This movement towards the book’s centre involves the poems in which communication and human connection is most threatened, most powerfully in “A Hundred Collars” and “Home Burial”, whereas the development towards community after “A Servant to Servants” is strongly represented by “After Apple-Picking” and

“The Generations of Men”. (It is striking that the poem which immediately follows

“A Servant to Servants”, “After Apple-Picking”, is the most lyrical in the collection, as though Frost invites us to relish imaginative freedom and suggestive, liberating possibility after the imprisoning narrative of “A Servant to Servants”.) “A Servant to Servants” is a pivotal poem, in much the same way as a short-story cycle might include a central story to which the other stories refer, either directly or obliquely. “A Servant to Servants” provides a thematic centre of appalling human loss and disengagement and the first half of North of Boston moves towards this point, whereas the trajectory of the second half is towards an affirmation of community, a movement that begins with “After Apple-Picking”.

Given this movement, the arrangement of North of Boston could be represented as a movement outward from “The Pasture” to “A Servant to Servants” and then a return movement from “A Servant to Servants” to “Good Hours”. The poetic sequence of the

12. Lionel Trilling, “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode”, reprinted in Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1962, 151-58.

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book could thus be represented in the following manner, indicating that “A Servant to Servants” forms a decisive turning-point in the collection:

The Pasture Good Hours

Mending Wall The Wood-Pile

The Death of the Hired Man The Self-Seeker

↓↓ The Mountain The Fear ↑↑

A Hundred Collars The Housekeeper Home Burial The Generations of Men The Black Cottage The Code

Blueberries After Apple-Picking A Servant to Servants

(pivotal poem)

The poems in the left-hand column represent the trajectory towards “A Servant to Servants” while those on the right involve the movement away from it. The left-hand column poems, which precede “A Servant to Servants”, are largely concerned with themes of disconnection, disengagement and alienation, themes that reach their climax in “A Servant to Servants”. The poems afterwards are increasingly focused on affirmative points of connection and communal possibility. This version of the book’s contents suggests that Frost has paired poems, just as he indicated in noting that

“Mending Wall” initiated a dialogue with “The Tuft of Flowers”. Recognizing North of Boston’s trajectory and this paired arrangement opens up many interpretive possibilities. It requires that we not only start to think of each poem in North of Boston as part of an overall movement, but also that we consider each poem in relation to its pair.

Some of these pairings seem fairly obvious because of the relative positioning of the poems and because of their stark tonal and thematic contrasts. “The Pasture”

paired with “Good Hours” and “Mending Wall” with “The Wood-Pile” are readily apparent, and in fact invite comparisons even without reference to the book’s narrative trajectory. “Mending Wall” is a dramatic monologue in 45 lines of blank verse; “The Wood Pile” a dramatic monologue in 40 lines of blank verse – in fact, in terms of length and form, these are the two most similar North of Boston poems. It may be too far-fetched, or even unnecessary, to think of the speakers of “Mending Wall” and “The Wood Pile” as the same person, but the association makes sense if we think of the later poem offering a perspective, and perhaps an answer, to the question asked in the earlier one. It seems as if in “Mending Wall” we are offered a choice between two alternatives. We can accept nature’s hostile destruction of human artefacts or we can struggle against this, erecting barriers and deceiving ourselves about their usefulness. The questions certainly involve others, concerning time and

paired with “Good Hours” and “Mending Wall” with “The Wood-Pile” are readily apparent, and in fact invite comparisons even without reference to the book’s narrative trajectory. “Mending Wall” is a dramatic monologue in 45 lines of blank verse; “The Wood Pile” a dramatic monologue in 40 lines of blank verse – in fact, in terms of length and form, these are the two most similar North of Boston poems. It may be too far-fetched, or even unnecessary, to think of the speakers of “Mending Wall” and “The Wood Pile” as the same person, but the association makes sense if we think of the later poem offering a perspective, and perhaps an answer, to the question asked in the earlier one. It seems as if in “Mending Wall” we are offered a choice between two alternatives. We can accept nature’s hostile destruction of human artefacts or we can struggle against this, erecting barriers and deceiving ourselves about their usefulness. The questions certainly involve others, concerning time and