III. “A BOY’S WILL”

Robert and his sister had been trained by their father to no love of New England. Circumstance, however, had now deposited them among the despised children of this section, and for the first time they saw pennies. They made up a little game. First, they would hold up a nickel and say, “San Francisco!” Then they would exhibit a penny and scornfully pronounce, “Boston!” But this childish snobbism soon vanished as they became more at home in the East.

Robert received the usual schooling and in high school clearly outstripped his class. He was apparently in full possession of valedictorian honors as graduation neared when a rival emerged coming rapidly forward from a lower class. The rival was a Lawrence girl, a descendant of the Whites of Acton who fought at Concord and of Peregrine White on the Mayflower. Elinor White was completing her high school course in two and a half years, thus catching up with Robert’s class, and when the averages were computed it was found that she had tied him for the honor of valedictorian. It was decided, nevertheless, that Robert Frost should deliver the address, while on the graduation program the names of Elinor Miriam White and Robert Frost should appear together as holders of the office. This happened to forecast the future, for the boy and girl, already friends, were married in October of 1895 and their names have ever since been joined in a union of singular idyllic beauty.

Another courtship was developing during the same phase of Robert Frost’s life which was also to ripen into a lifelong devotion, and that was the courting of the Muse of Poetry. Before he left San Francisco, he had begun a serial story. It concerned the doings of a lost and forgotten tribe living in a ravine no one of the outside world knew about. After he came east, he continued this serial from time to time, filling in the details of scenery and inhabitants.

Here we strike a master-image, one that constantly recurs in Frost’s life, for aside from the varieties of it to be found in his poems—for example, in such lines as “Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose” and the first two stanzas of Into My Own—the poet has confessed that often he puts himself to sleep by dreaming of this inaccessible and sometimes happy tribe defending its canyon. One hopes that this recurrent and dominant image will not be subjected to the ingenious but suspect leaps to conclusions of the psycho-analysts. Better far the slower method of the behaviorist who is in closer accord with the commonsense of man which tells us that we do not thoroughly know people until we have seen them in many situations over a lengthy span of seasons.

When fourteen Robert Frost began to open books with a new zest. Hitherto he had been content to have his mother read to him and his favorite story had been Tom Brown’s School Days which characteristically he had never finished—because he could not bear the thought that he had completed the tale. But now he adventured for himself among books. He read with eager responsiveness all of William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe. He went on to Shelley’s Alastor and Keats’ Endymion but found them too much at the time for his interests and resources. Edward Rowland Sill and his Emersonianism was better adapted to his requirements, and Frost still preserves a mild respect for this obscured Connecticut poet who in his day carried the fruitage of New England culture to the far West.

The following year at the age of fifteen Frost was himself trying out his hand at writing verse, and two years later composed My Butterfly which is one of the pieces in A Boy’s Will and the earliest poem he has kept. The first stanza is quoted not only to reveal its superiority to the poetry of adolescence at large but to explain what followed its publication.

The tentative submission of My Butterfly to the Independent had brought a prompt note of acceptance and a check for fifteen dollars. It happened that William Hays Ward, the editor, was a devout student of Sidney Lanier, a fact that explains his liking for the musical dexterity of this poem, but though he printed some of the subsequent poems Frost mailed him, he never liked another as well. They were not in the Lanier vein, and that was where a young poet should be working. But Frost was obdurate then as now in these concerns, and Ward gave him up.

So at seventeen Robert Frost was looking very much like the Frost of today. He was dipping into literature apparently without system but really reading for his own purposes as a nascent poet. He was assimilating New England and coming close to an essence of its oldest settlers in a girl who was to prove an ideal helpmate through the years of unrecognition that lay ahead. He was displaying literary talent well above the merely good for those of his years. And he was showing a certain “set” character and pertinacity in finding out his own direction in poetry. William Hays Ward tried to divert him and failed. Twenty odd years later in London Ezra Pound at once recognized this “set-ness” and did not try to instigate any changes.