I’m looking at a copy of Robert Frost’s first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will. It came out in 1915, when that dour New England farmer was 41 years old. Yet there is a strong strain of youth in it, as there is in much of Frost’s poetry, at least until he grew, to my taste, too much of the analytical satirist — but that was much later, and I miss then the smell of the farmland and the sound of the animals shuffling in the stable. The copy I’ve got — well, it is on line — is signed, “To Jack Hagstrom, from Robert Frost, Amherst 1954.” So Frost was about 80 by then, and the story is that he’d met the young fellow Hagstrom a few years before, in 1951, when he came to Amherst College to speak about poetry. Hagstrom was then just a kid, really — a freshman, 18 years old. But somebody got the idea to invite him to a reception at the president’s house after the lecture, and somebody else got the idea to have him walk the old man back to his room afterwards. Well, old man and boy ended up strolling about Amherst till 2:00 in the morning, and they became good friends. It was all the easier for him to make friends with Frost, Hagstrom later said, because he had no ambition to become a writer. He was instead a book collector. The friendship endured till Frost’s death in 1963.

Please Upgrade to Support Word & Song

Dear Readers, I find something deeply wistful in that story. I can imagine myself in either role — both of those men were shy, and maybe sometimes it’s the shy people, who aren’t good at small talk, who find each other and warm up to something they both delight in; and when all the noise is far away, they talk about books or growing up on a farm or whatever, while there’s hardly a sound in the world around them, maybe a car far off, or the call of a night bird, or the wind in the leaves. Old and young, but somehow the years between them disappear.

Most of the poems in A Boy’s Will are wistful, and you’d think, “What should wistfulness have to do with being a boy?” Why, I think instead that too many people lose their youthful wistfulness and have to recover it when they are old, when they see that so many of the people and the things they have loved are gone. But being a boy in the quiet woods, on the top of a high hill, listening to a small creek rippling by, seeing far away the work of human hands but not the hands that dug the mine or laid the tracks or cleared the hill, hearing now and again the toll of a bell — or, as you lie on your bed just before you fall asleep, the hoarse distant whistle of a train — I know what these are like.
And maybe also the first period of a marriage is like that too, in the mysterious quiet between the joy of the wedding and the cry of the child? That’s what I think we’ve got in our Poem of the Week, “Going for Water.” It’s perhaps just my imagination, because Frost doesn’t tell us who the “we” in the poem is supposed to be, but from a clue here and there, the laughter, the hand laid upon a hand, I think that the two people are husband and wife, and since no children are mentioned — who surely would have been sent instead to fetch water — I think they are young, and they delight in one another’s company. It’s late in the day, in the early autumn, about the time of year we’ve got now up north, not too cold yet. And it’s clear that we’re not in a town, since the people get their water from a well, which has gone dry. So they seek out a brook, with a pail and a can, hoping that the brook is still running, hoping to hear it before they see it, and as they do so, they seem to play hide-and-seek with the moon.

Give the Gift of Word & Song

For most of the poems in “A Boy’s Will,” Frost appends a brief sentence of description in the Table of Contents. This one’s got none at all. Does that mean Frost thought little of it? Maybe it means that he didn’t want to spoil it with a caption, but let it speak for itself. I hear in its last lines an echo of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where streams are found “rolling on orient pearl and sands of gold,” or where the water-birds on their first day of creation swim or float on the “silver lakes and running streams.” It’s just a hint, because Frost wasn’t one to use a sledge hammer to pound his points home. There’s something about their love, in a place that nobody would confuse with the Garden of Eden, that is innocent, with a sort of moonlight innocence, as of a youth wise with many years, or of age with the twinkling light of youth still in the eye. What do you think?

Share Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

The well was dry beside the door, And so we went with pail and can Across the fields behind the house To seek the brook if still it ran; Not loth to have excuse to go, Because the autumn eve was fair (Though chill), because the fields were ours, And by the brook our woods were there. We ran as if to meet the moon That slowly dawned behind the trees, The barren boughs without the leaves, Without the birds, without the breeze. But once within the wood, we paused Like gnomes that hid us from the moon, Ready to run to hiding new With laughter when she found us soon. Each laid on other a staying hand To listen ere we dared to look, And in the hush we joined to make We heard, we knew we heard the brook. A note as from a single place, A slender tinkling fall that made Now drops that floated on the pool Like pearls, and now a silver blade.

Browse Our Archive