Reflections on Robert Frost's
North of Boston, published in England in May of 1914, was Robert Frost's second book, following A Boy's Will, which had been published the year before. In 1915 it was published in America, preceding A Boy's Will here. The book is markedly different from A Boy's Will, in that it is less introspective and more in an objective mode. In the first book Frost gives us a speaker who, in most cases, is ruminative and reflective. North of Boston gives us more dialogue and the poems are more like stories; Frost has drawn for us quaint pictures of New England life and uses these seemingly simple settings to render intimations of meaning that are truly vast in range. As Lawrence Thompson says in his book, Robert Frost, "he portrays a variety of rural New England responses to the human predicament, not for purposes of recording 'local color' but rather to evoke universal extensions of meaning"(9). In this book Frost provides opposing viewpoints to explore a variety of subjects through the interaction of people. North of Boston intersperses lyric poems with lyric moments in non-lyric poems. The book is written almost entirely in blank verse, framed by the monologues Mending Wall in the beginning and The Wood-Pile as the last poem. Good Hours
More than any of Frost's other books, North of Boston is "a book of people" (Thompson 9). With the exception of Good Hours, After Apple-Picking, and The Generations of Men (which I found so uninteresting as to omit in my analysis), the poems all use dialogue as a device to show more than one interpretation of an issue. Using contrast or ambiguity tends to compel the reader to question associations often thought of as fixed and well defined. Frost makes copious use of contradiction in all his books, but no other book offers so much dialogue to make available to the reader multiplicities of significance. True to his word, however, Frost never, in this book, allows a poem's message to become more important than is the natural, conversational sound of his verse. Thompson, Lawrence. Robert Frost. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1959. Mending Wall, as Louis Untermeyer notes in Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken, rests upon a contradiction. Its two famous lines oppose each other (110). "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," the poem opens. "Good fences make good neighbors," it says later. In each of these places in the poem the reader finds himself nodding at the truths stated. If man resents the limitations and boundaries he finds in life, he nevertheless needs structure and guidelines. The speaker's position is set against the wall, and he gets the last word: I never saw a man let family troubles Frost, himself, downplayed the importance of any sense of meaning in these poems: "Meaning is a great consideration. But a story must never seem to be told primarily for meaning. Anything, an inspired irrelevance even to make it sound as if told the way it is chiefly because it happened that way" (Pritchard 93). Frost was able to recreate the natural, homely sound of the speech of rural New England people; he was trying to be a poet for the masses, but in a new and distinctive way. Later, he would refine this idea into his "sound of sense" theory of poetics, which he was already beginning to write about in letters to friends in 1913-1914. Later, he would also pack quite of bit of political meaning into his poems, as he voiced his opposition to New Deal politics. Frost never minded contradictions when they suited his purposes and the first poem in North of Boston stands as testament to the fact.
Some common words found in the essay are:
Louis Untermeyer, North Boston, Home Burial, Boston Frost, Mending Wall, Black Cottage, Servant Servants, Hired Mary, Death Hired, Frost Road, north boston, death hired, robert frost, home burial, poems north boston, sound sense, black cottage, york henry, fences neighbors, rural england, doesn't love wall, meaning poems,
Approximate Word count = 2265
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)
|
