Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this book.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Frost wrote poems that sound like neighbors talking over a fence, and hide big questions inside. A man keeps fixing a stone wall that keeps falling down. A husband and wife grieve in opposite ways. A hired man comes home to die. The words are plain and the rhymes slide by quietly, but the feelings stay with you for days. This is his best book of people.
Frost was an American farmer poet whom England discovered first: he moved his family to England in 1912, published A Boy's Will and then, in 1914, this book, and came home famous. North of Boston collects the dramatic dialogues he called his book of people, poems set in the hill farms of New Hampshire where men and women talk in blank verse that sounds like speech overheard through a farmhouse door.
The great pieces are conversations with silence in them. Mary and Warren argue, gently and terribly, about whether the dying hired man has a home; a couple who have lost a child circle each other in Home Burial, the husband digging, the wife unable to forgive his way of grieving; a wall gets mended every spring by two neighbors who no longer remember why, giving American English its most quoted line about fences.
Frost's trick is that the plain surface is real and so is the depth. He insisted poetry should begin in delight and end in wisdom, and these begin in talk. Read them aloud with a friend, taking parts; they were built for voices.
Robert Frost called this 1914 collection his book of people. Farm neighbors in New Hampshire hills talk their way through grief, fear, pride, and stubborn love in some of the most famous poems in American English: Mending Wall, Home Burial, The Death of the Hired Man, After Apple-Picking. The language sounds like plain speech and works like music.
The first chapter
I'M going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.--You come too.
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1914. Author died 1963. Public domain in the US. Share this book: WhatsApp
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