North of Boston
Frost's second collection reads less like poetry and more like unearthing a lost species of American drama. These are not lyrics but conversations - tense, economical dialogues between farmers, neighbors, husbands and wives, masters and hired men. Set in the hard soil of rural New England, each poem unfolds a small crisis: a wall to be mended, a hired man arriving at dusk, a couple debating whether to fetch a stranger from the mountain. Frost captures the particular New England speech - its silences, its stubbornness, its refusal to say directly what matters. The title promises a place, but the real geography here is psychological: the distances between people who share the same fence line, the same blood, the same roof. These are poems where everything important happens in what's not said.
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“Before I built a wall I'd ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offense.””
— Robert Frost
“He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees.””
— Robert Frost
“A man must partly give up being a man With women-folk.””
— Robert Frost
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard.””
— Robert Frost
“I sha'n't catch up in this world, anyway. I'd rather you'd not go unless you must.””
— Robert Frost
“He never got up high enough to see.That's why I don't advise your trying this side.He tried this side. I've always meant to goAnd look myself, but you know how it is:It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountainYou've worked around the foot of all your life.””
— Robert Frost
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,They have to take you in.' 'I should have called itSomething you somehow haven't to deserve.””
— Robert Frost
“Spring is the mischief in me””
— Robert Frost
“I had for my winter evening walk-No one at all with whom to talk,But I had the cottages in a rowUp to their shining eyes in snow.And I thought I had the folk within:I had the sound of a violin;I had a glimpse through curtain lacesOf youthful forms and youthful faces.I had such company outward bound.I went till there were no cottages found.I turned and repented, but coming backI saw no window but that was black.Over the snow my creaking feetDisturbed the slumbering village streetLike profanation, by your leave,At ten o'clock of a winter eve.””
— Robert Frost
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Frost, Robert. North of Boston. Lex, lex-books.com/book/north-of-boston-758191cc-f084-42e7-9fc8-0176b90427ca.Frost, R. (n.d.). North of Boston. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/north-of-boston-758191cc-f084-42e7-9fc8-0176b90427caFrost, Robert. North of Boston. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/north-of-boston-758191cc-f084-42e7-9fc8-0176b90427ca.
