My Frost is dramatic – to me, Robert Frost is stronger writing dramatic poems than lyrics. "North of Boston,"is, by far, the better book than "A Boy's Will." Robert Frost’s dramatic poems are more American. Overwhelmingly, they have a setting: they take somewhere in New England - whether it’s a farm, a home, or a field. That may be a big reason why “A Hundred Collars” is not as popular as “The Road Not Taken” - because “A Hundred Collars” is in Lancaster, New Hampshire. The road that diverges in two? That could be anywhere - and thus “The Road Not Taken” could be the Russian poem, English poem, Japanese poem, or whatever - it has a universality that most of "North of Boston" just doesn’t. The British poems of "A Boy's Will," have too many caesuras and flowery that stop the flow of reading, while the American poems of "North of Boston" show Frost’s “American ear” that prizes sentence sounds and the limitation of caesuras, as Walcott emphasized.
Look to any dramatic poem in "North of Boston" to see the greatness of Frost’s dramatic poetry - the first of which is “Death of a Hired Man.” The poem starts off with a the first conversation we see in a Frost poem to date, one between Mary and Warren about the arrival of an old hired man, Sila. “She ran on tiptoe down the darkened passage/ To meet him in the doorway with the news/ And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’” This is the poem where Frost can best capture human emotions and phenomena - and he does this through the petty feelings of betrayal in Warren: “What good is he? Who else will harbor him/ At his age for the little he can do?/ What help he is there’s no depending on.” There’s jealousy in the air later when Warren talks of Silas’s rich brother who lives down the road.
The dialogue moves seamlessly, and the emotions that complement them do, too. I can imagine a Warren and Mary having this conversation in the room next to me. Even if I could only hear the sentence sounds and not the words, Warren’s lines 99-103 contain Oh sounds and an angry tone that just keep hammering away at his disdain for Silas’s return.. “Poor Silas, so concerned for other folk,/ And nothing to look backward to with pride,/ And nothing to look forward to with hope,/ So now and never different.” Like in “Home Burial,” Frost sprinkles a couple of emotionally significant lines that are so powerful that one can’t imagine them actually being in dialogue, or Mary actually saying this about an old hired hand: “‘Warren,” she said, “he has come home to die:/ You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.”
Warren repeats the most important theme in the next line, “‘Home,’ he mocked gently.” What does it say about Silas, a character we don’t know, who is merely gossiped about, that he chose to die in the place he worked as a hand rather than in his rich brother’s house? Like Mary, “I wonder what’s between them,” and I don’t think that’s a question that will ever be answered. The complexities behind this dramatic poem are profound, and what’s not said is sometimes more important than what is said. What’s the nature of Silas’s family that he can’t even return to his brother’s home? What makes Mary so much more sympathetic to his plight than Warren?
And so comes the most pivotal kernel for why Warren is so hurt by Warren: “he hurt my heart.” For Mary, the reason why she wants to forgive is in lines 76-77: “I sympathize. I know just how it feels,/ To think of the right thing to say too late.” I can imagine Joseph Brodsky writing an essay on “Death of a Hired Man” as “On Hurt and Forgiveness,” and how Mary and Warren are trying to fuse the two together. Mary is the more wise and mature of the two: she foreshadows that before they can bring him home, he will die.
This emotional complexity and ability to capture such a wide range of feelings, so fully and in a short amount of time, are what make my Frost best as a dramatic, rather than lyric poet.
