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Daily · Classics

North of Boston

Robert Frost · poetry collection, 1914·1 hrs in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
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  • The book opens with an invitation, not a lecture. "The Pasture" ends both its stanzas with "I sha'n't be gone long. You come too," turning the entire collection into a walk taken together instead of a poem delivered from a distance.
  • "Mending Wall" never settles who actually needs the wall. The narrator asks, "before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out," but his neighbor just repeats his father's line, "Good fences make good neighbours," twice, unmoved by the question.
  • "The Death of the Hired Man" ends on a single word. After the whole poem debating whether to take back the failing farmhand Silas, Warren goes in to check on him and comes back out with just: "'Warren,' she questioned. 'Dead,' was all he answered."
  • Mary and Warren argue home into two competing definitions. She calls it "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in"; he answers, "Something you somehow haven't to deserve." Neither line wins, and the poem moves on without settling it.
  • "Home Burial" turns a father's shoveling into an unforgivable act. Amy watched him from the window "making the gravel leap and leap in air" while he dug their child's grave, then heard him remark afterward that "three foggy mornings and one rainy day will rot the best birch fence," proof to her that he "couldn't care."
  • The final poem closes the book on a dark, shut house. In "Good Hours" the speaker passes lit windows full of violin music and young faces, then turns back to find "no window but that was black," his own footsteps on the snow suddenly a "profanation... at ten o'clock of a winter eve."
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•Why it earns a slot

Why it earns a slot: it is the book that replaced Frost's own lyric voice with other people's, dialogue and dramatic monologue carrying the weight, so the reader has to work out the grief and the stubbornness for themselves.

A collection of New England narrative poems where neighbors, spouses, and hired hands keep talking around the one thing they actually mean.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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