The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Robert Frost · a book of seventeen poems, a prefatory poem, fifteen poems and a closing poem · David Nutt, London, 1914; Henry Holt, New York, 1915 · scored as the book as published, on Frost’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Dramatic dialogue and monologue in blank verse, the measure filled with the intonations of Yankee speech; two rhymed lyrics as frame, and two rhymed pieces within
Mythos
The boundary and the rite of its repair; the prodigal who is no one’s son, come home to die; the harvest as a fall and a long sleep; a labour without witness left to burn in a swamp
Phase
An invitation into a farmer’s chores, then a walk through other people’s houses, and at the close a solitary walker outside the lit cottages as they go dark
Presentation
Poems; seventeen, thirteen of them in blank verse, most dialogues between country people with a narrator’s frame in some and none in others; the longest well over a hundred lines
Register
Talk: plain words, no inversions and almost no poetic vocabulary, with stresses falling where a speaker’s would against a strict count
Scale
One region, one class, one decade: farms, kitchens, a hotel room, a mill’s settlement, a graveyard, and the hills
Governing Proposition
Seventeen poems, most of them dialogues and dramatic monologues in blank verse, between the country people of a failing New England region: a husband and wife in a kitchen arguing over a hired man come home to die, a couple who cannot speak across the grave of their child, two neighbours mending a wall each spring, a farm wife who cannot get through her housework. The wager of the book is that the speaking voice of ordinary people, held in strict metre without the diction of poetry, can carry tragedy, and that what passes and fails between two voices in one line is the deepest matter there is: the codes of speech, work and boundary that shelter these people also wall them off, and the worst injuries are made in the gap between what one can say and what another can hear.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“You come too.” Each of the two short rhymed stanzas of “The Pasture” ends on the invitation, and the book that follows is the walk it promises: into kitchens and onto porches, across a boundary wall, through an orchard, into a swamp. North of Boston is Robert Frost’s second book of poems, published in London by David Nutt in 1914 and in New York by Henry Holt in 1915. It was written in the main in England, from 1912 to 1914, out of the years of the farm at Derry, from 1900 to 1911.
This page scores it as the book as published: the prefatory poem, fifteen poems, and the closing poem, “Good Hours”. The fifteen are “Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “The Mountain”, “A Hundred Collars”, “Home Burial”, “The Black Cottage”, “Blueberries”, “A Servant to Servants”, “After Apple-Picking”, “The Code”, “The Generations of Men”, “The Housekeeper”, “The Fear”, “The Self-Seeker” and “The Wood-Pile”. Thirteen of the seventeen are in blank verse, most of them dialogues or dramatic monologues between country people, with a narrator’s frame in some and none in others. The exceptions are the two frame poems, “After Apple-Picking” in rhymed lines of irregular length, and “Blueberries” in rhymed couplets of a rocking measure.
The frame is the book’s first argument. “The Pasture” invites; “Good Hours” closes on a solitary walk past lit cottages that go dark, the walker left outside the people the book has entered. Between them the lyric voice gives way to other people’s voices, and the book is weighed most on six of them: “Home Burial”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “Mending Wall”, “A Servant to Servants”, “After Apple-Picking” and “The Wood-Pile”, then “The Fear” and “The Black Cottage”.
Movement II
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and “Good fences make good neighbors”: two voices, and one wall between them. Each spring two neighbours meet to repair the boundary between their land. The speaker is half in mischief; the neighbour carries his stones like a man out of an older age and repeats his father’s saying. The poem stands first among the fifteen because its question, what a wall keeps in and keeps out, is the question of every later house.
The repair becomes a rite older than its performers. What the “Something” is the poem will not say, and the boundary takes on the double weight of the sacred and the primitive without a single allusion to either. The myth is built out of a chore.
The line everyone knows is the neighbour’s. “Good fences make good neighbors” is quoted constantly as the poem’s moral, and the poem gives it to the man the speaker doubts. For a hundred years the poem has been read for walls, against walls, and as a poem about the impossibility of deciding; it still refuses to settle who is right, and the misreading that has made the neighbour’s line the poem’s is part of its life.
Movement III
Silas, an old hired man, has come back to the farm, and Mary makes the case to Warren for taking him in. The poem is their talk in the kitchen, framed by a narrator, and its knowledge is in what the talk does not settle.
Two laws of home stand side by side in one kitchen: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in”, and “Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Neither wins. Mary’s quiet case turns Warren without his conceding, and the pacing of the turn is exact. Silas is the prodigal who is no one’s son, and what he is to Warren the poem leaves open.
Then the sky enters the kitchen window: “Part of a moon was falling down the west, / Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.” The poem ends on one word: “Dead.” The death has been arriving the length of the poem, paced to the line, and when it comes it is a single syllable of talk.
Movement IV
A husband buried their child himself, and then he spoke of how “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.” His wife heard callousness. The poem is the quarrel that follows, and it is the book’s centre: grief in the dialect of work, heard by someone who grieves in another dialect. His cry, “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”, is a pentameter and a plea at once.
The form is the instrument. The lines are broken, shared and overlapped between two people who cannot hear each other, and the strict measure holds his flatness and her pitch to one count, so that the gap between them is heard in the line itself. Neither is wrong. At the close she goes out the door, and he threatens to bring her back by force: a terror without a raised voice.
“A Servant to Servants” is the other face. A farm wife who says she cannot get through her housework tells a stranger of an uncle kept caged in the house and of her own confinement. She repeats her husband’s saying, “the best way out is always through”, and whether she is going mad the poem does not decide. The madness it discloses is the madness of labour without rest.
Movement V
“After Apple-Picking” leaves the dialogues for an inward voice in rhymed lines of irregular length that drift as sleep drifts. A ladder is left “sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still”; the picker is overtired “Of the great harvest I myself desired”; the apples swell in his dream. Harvest becomes a fall and a death, and the poem closes on the doubt whether the sleep coming on is the woodchuck’s, “Or just some human sleep.”
“The Wood-Pile” finds, in a swamp, a woodpile cut, stacked and left, and closes on “the slow smokeless burning of decay”: a labour without witness, warming the swamp. It is the book’s image of making and forgetting, and its last height.
“Good Hours” brings the walker home alone, past cottages whose lights go out. The book has gone into seventeen houses and come out again. What it has learned there is told in the voices of the people inside, held to one measure, and it is the matter of a region and a class and a decade; that narrowness is its limit, and the exactness within it is its achievement.
Act III · The Twelve
The test is subtractive, and the great poems pass it. Nothing in “Home Burial” could go, and the slow arrival of Silas’s death in “The Death of the Hired Man” is paced to the line. The frame is exact: “The Pasture” opens on an invitation into a farmer’s chores, each stanza ending “You come too”, and the book is that walk, into kitchens, onto porches, across a boundary wall; “Good Hours” closes on a walker outside the cottages the book has entered. What lowers the axis is the middle. “A Hundred Collars” and “The Generations of Men” are looser, the second a flirtation drawn out past its matter; “Blueberries” is a pleasant gossip; “The Housekeeper” repeats a household of failed bonds that other poems give with more pressure. Three or four poems could leave with small loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. In a depleted country, where farms are failing and neighbours are miles apart, people are bound by codes of speech, work and boundary that both shelter them and wall them off, and the deepest injuries are made in the gap between what one person can say and what another can hear. “Home Burial” is the centre: a husband who buried their child himself, a wife who cannot forgive the plainness that was his grief. Neither is wrong; grief has dialects. “The Death of the Hired Man” sets two definitions of home side by side and lets neither win. “A Servant to Servants” discloses the madness of labour without rest. Held below the high band because the field of disclosure is one region and one class, seen with exactness rather than with range.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The register is talk, and elevation comes rarely and by stealth; the axis counts that against frequency. When it comes it is high. In “The Death of the Hired Man” a moon falls down the west and drags the whole sky with it to the hills, a cosmic movement set into a kitchen conversation, and the poem ends on the single word “Dead”. The close of “Home Burial”, the husband’s threat to bring his wife back by force as she goes out the door, is a terror without a raised voice. “After Apple-Picking” rises steadily into its dream, the ladder pointing toward heaven still, the apples magnified. “The Wood-Pile” ends on “the slow smokeless burning of decay”. Four or five such summits in seventeen poems: real height, moderate frequency, with long stretches of deliberate level.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The particular stays rigorously particular, a farm, a town, a neighbour, and in the best poems the archetype is built, not alluded to. “Mending Wall” makes the spring repair of a boundary a rite older than its performers: the neighbour carries his stones as a primitive would, repeating his father’s saying, and the myth of the boundary, what is sacred and what is primitive in it and what the “Something” is that does not love a wall, is the poem’s structure, not its ornament. “After Apple-Picking” builds the harvest as a fall and a death, with no allusion at all. “The Death of the Hired Man” is the return of the prodigal who is no one’s son. “The Wood-Pile” makes a labour without witness an image of making and forgetting. Held below 8.5 because most of the dialogues stay social and local; the archetype bears load in four or five poems, not across the book.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is Wordsworth’s pastoral of country people, Browning’s dramatic monologue, the Virgilian eclogue, and the poetic diction of the Victorian and Georgian lyric. The turn was to take blank verse, the most proven of English measures, and fill it with the actual intonations of Yankee speech, so that sense is carried by tone, the tone of a sentence heard through a door. Dialogue with no lyric heightening, about hired men and hens and a mill accident’s settlement, set in metre with no inversions and almost no poetic vocabulary: a real departure in 1914, the year before “Prufrock” appeared, and a stake, since a book of talk with no music but the talking could have read as flat verse fiction. Held below 8.5 because the swerve is within the inherited form, not against it: Frost walked the path of blank verse and the pastoral dialogue differently rather than leaving it.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and much of what the book knows goes. Set “Home Burial” as a prose story and it keeps its plot but loses its instrument: the pressure of iambic expectation against the broken, overlapping half-line exchanges of two people who cannot hear each other, where a line shared between two speakers is itself the gap between them. The book knows that meaning lives in tone and that tone is what fails between people, and it carries that knowledge in the counterpoint of metre and speech: the reader hears the husband’s flatness and the wife’s pitch because the line holds both to one measure. The dialogue form, without a narrator’s verdict in most poems, is the second instrument; it leaves both definitions of home in the air and both builders at the wall. Where the form bears less, in “Blueberries” and “The Generations of Men”, the poems are weaker, which argues the point.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Evidence first, and there is a century of it. “Mending Wall” has been read for a hundred years as a poem for walls, against walls, about the speaker’s own mischief and about the impossibility of deciding, and it still refuses to settle who is right; its most quoted line, “Good fences make good neighbors”, is the neighbour’s, not the speaker’s, and is constantly quoted as the poem’s moral. “Home Burial” has drawn sustained close reading. “After Apple-Picking” keeps its double reading, harvest and death, open. The questions planted stay open: what Silas is to Warren, what the wife in “Home Burial” saw, whether the speaker of “A Servant to Servants” is going mad. The yield runs at the level of the line, where an intonation can be heard more than one way. Held below the high band because the lesser dialogues are exhausted on a first reading.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is poetry in English in the early twentieth century. The intrinsic force: the book showed that the speaking voice of ordinary people could be the whole substance of serious verse, in strict metre and without the diction of poetry, and that the dramatic dialogue could carry tragedy in a kitchen. That reorganised the possibilities of the narrative and dramatic poem, and offered a modernism of voice and plain fact parallel to Pound’s and Eliot’s. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the line of plain-speech dramatic verse runs from this book through Randall Jarrell’s monologues and Robert Lowell’s narrative poems of the 1940s and 1950s, and on to Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon. Charged because the main current of modernist reach ran through Pound and Eliot, and Frost’s school is a counter-current; and much of his reach is through the later books and the whole career, which this unit does not own.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over a hundred and twelve years. Form: the text survives whole as published, with no loss and no contested recension; there is nothing to charge. Presence is continuous: “Mending Wall”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “Home Burial” and “After Apple-Picking” have been in school and university anthologies and taught without a break since the 1920s, and lines from the first two have passed into common speech and public use, which counts here only as presence. The fabric is fixed to a moment, the hill farms of New Hampshire around 1900 in decline, but as setting, not as a production era, and the book does not depend on the reader knowing it. The figure stops a step short of the widest presence because the presence is of the poems more than of the book: the unit as a book is read less continuously than its four anthology pieces.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Frost’s English. The command is of blank verse as speech: lines that keep a strict count while their stresses fall where a speaker’s would, so that irritation, evasion and pleading are heard in the metre itself. “Home Burial” is the summit of it: the husband’s “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”, a pentameter that is also a cry, against the scansion of the wife’s broken half-lines. The pacing of “The Death of the Hired Man”, where Mary’s quiet case for Silas turns Warren without his conceding, is exact. “After Apple-Picking” shows another command, irregular rhymed lines that drift as sleep drifts, the rhymes arriving late like returning sounds. The weaknesses are of slackness, not of skill: the dialogue of “The Generations of Men” and “A Hundred Collars” runs on, and plainness in a few places becomes merely plain. Held under 9.0 because the command, superb in its kind, holds fewer registers at once than the highest makers.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One law governs: the voice of the place, spoken in metre, about lives bounded by work, weather and the next farm. Take the two most distant elements, the comedy of “A Hundred Collars”, where a shy doctor shares a hotel room with a hard-drinking collector, and the madness of “A Servant to Servants”, where a farm wife who says she cannot get through her housework tells a stranger of an uncle kept caged in the house and of her own confinement. They obey the same law: talk between strangers, in the same measure, across a boundary of class or of sanity, and the same refusal to judge. The lyric frame poems obey it from the other side, the solitary walker outside the houses. Held at this figure because the range, comedy, tragedy, gossip and vision, lies inside one region, one class and one decade, and the coherence of a narrow world is partly its narrowness.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged as a short book of poems. Labour, fully: haying, apple-picking, wall-mending, wood-cutting, housework, the mill. The family and marriage: the child’s grave, the couple who cannot speak, the housekeeper’s daughter who leaves a man after years unmarried. Death, in Silas and in the child. Madness and the mind under strain. Community and its law: neighbours, the code of the hired hand in “The Code”, charity and its limits. The economy of a failing region: a crippled man’s claim settled with a company lawyer in “The Self-Seeker”, abandoned farms, the cellar holes of “The Generations of Men”. History, faintly, in the Civil War widow of “The Black Cottage” and her belief in equality. The natural order, as the hills and the swamp. The state and the sacred are only glimpsed. One ground and one voice integrate them. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is the form: seventeen poems of one county cannot hold a society’s whole structure. A low mark on a small form describes the form.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 8.9, and The Unconcealment, The Living Form and The Bottomless Well at 8.7. Four poems taught without a break for a century from a text whole as published; blank verse made speech, so that a pentameter can be a cry; a disclosure that holds, that grief has dialects and that the codes which shelter people also wall them off; a form in which two voices held to one measure are the gap between them; and a wall poem that still will not say who is right.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: labour, marriage, death, madness, community and a failing economy are present in poems, not in passing, and one place and one voice integrate them, but seventeen poems of one county cannot hold a society’s whole structure. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.2, held by frequency: the talk rises rarely, four or five times in seventeen poems, and by design. Then The Inevitable at 8.3, held by a looser middle of three or four poems.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.7, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, The Swerve at 8.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 each fall a tenth short. The archetype is built in four or five poems and the dialogues stay social and local; the swerve is made within blank verse and the pastoral dialogue rather than against them; and the reach is a counter-current to the main modernist one, much of it owed to the later books. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Sublime at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Robert Frost’s North of Boston, scored as the book as published by David Nutt, London, in 1914, and by Henry Holt, New York, in 1915: the prefatory poem “The Pasture”, fifteen poems, and the closing poem “Good Hours”. The book is the unit; “Home Burial”, “The Death of the Hired Man”, “Mending Wall”, “A Servant to Servants”, “After Apple-Picking” and “The Wood-Pile” are weighed most, and “A Hundred Collars”, “The Generations of Men”, “Blueberries” and “The Housekeeper” least. Every axis is judged on Frost’s English; no translation stands between. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, and cited by poem; everything else is paraphrased. The six poems weighed most are known closely, line by line in places; the lesser dialogues in situation, speakers and outline, not in their verse, and the axes that lean on them are judged with that allowance. The membership of the book and its first and last places are certain; the order of every middle place is not, and the page argues none of it. Facts that could not be verified, among them the relation of the American edition to the English, the dedication, the count of lines, the place where particular poems were first drafted, the book’s first reviews and its reception on Frost’s return to America, Frost’s own name for the sound of his verse and the letters in which he gave it, the length of particular poems, particular essays on “Home Burial”, and the poets who took up poetry or wrote of Frost under his direct influence, are not given. Citations are by poem.