Robert Frost; In The Country of Milk and Sugar

Robert Frost in the country of milk and sugar is made possible in part by a grant from the New Hampshire State Council on the arts. Oh. At the end of March in 1915 Robert Frost was out walking on the outskirts of

Franconia New Hampshire looking for a house to purchase. Not long before frosted return from England where he had stayed for more than two years becoming deeply homesick for the state he had left behind. I never knew how much of a Yankee I was until I'd been out of blue Hampshire. I suppose life in such towns as Plymouth and Derry is the best life on Earth. Now Robert Frost was determined to settle in New Hampshire once again this time in the region of the White Mountains. About a mile outside of the village of Franconia he found what he took to be a splendid property and had a view of the Franconia range of the White Mountains dominated by Mt. Lafayette. The only problem that Robert Frost could find with the house. Was somebody already lived there. As he stood admiring the farm he discovered a man named Willis Herbert cleaning up the yard after

the long winter. His daughter Leslie remembers the see the 1977 letter. A vivid memory still left. Sixty two years. Well I remember the day my father and I walked up the hill road out of Franconia and came on the Willis Herbert farm facing one of those spectacular mountain views that the White Mountains provide. This time the Lafayette range and my father said this is it. He walked across the lawn to a man digging the spring earth and went straight to the point. You wouldn't want to sell me this place would you. Well after several more meetings and arrangements we owned it. We shingled. Painted build a shed at the back. Porch at the front. And settled down to keeping watch of many moons rising and falling over Lafayette. The purchase price was a thousand dollars. By early June Frost his wife Eleanor and the four children had moved in. As it turned out Robert

Frost could hardly have found a better place than the Franconia farm to lay claim to the territory of northern New England in the five years he lived there. He threw himself into farming and into verse as well irrevocably entering the roles of Yankee and Yankee poet. He started each day in the barn milking the two cows he had bought from willows Herbert. And though he had been a clumsy Melkor before he was now able to boast in a letter. You will be glad to hear that my cows and I have composed our differences and I now Melk them angry that one and only. In the summer months the poet and his children planted and cared for a large vegetable garden. And in their first Franconia spring assisted by their new neighbor Willis Herbert. The family tapped the large maple trees on the property collecting pails of sap to be boiled down into sugar for certain. In his poem evening in the sugar orchard Robert Frost recalls a night of Franconia spent boiling sap

with the poet Raymond Holden. Occasionally the two of them would take turns going outside of the sugar house to get more wood for the fire. It's Frost turned to go outside for board in the evening in the sugar orchard which recounts the beauty he discovered on the way. From where I live in a lot Mark outside the sugar house one night for choice. I call the firemen with a careful voice and bade him leave the pan and stop the arch. Fireman of the fire and others and send more

sparks up the chimney with the smoke. I thought a few might tangle as they did among bare maple Barlow's in the rare Hill atmosphere and not ceased to glow. And so he added the moon up there. The moon. So slight. Was moved enough to show on every tree a bucket with a lid. And on black ground. Your skin rug of small. Sparks made no attempt to be the moon. They were content to figure in the tree as Leo. Ryan and the Pleiades. And that was what the boughs were full of so. During the years he lived in Derry New Hampshire Robert Frost became interested in the names and

habitats of plants and trees in northern New England. At his new property. He investigated the woods and meadows in the spring and Brooks as well finding a variety of wild flowers trees and shrubs. Then he and his children transplanted some of the species they found to the Franconia home. One of the poets best known lyrics. Nothing gold can stay dating from the Franconia period evidences for us awareness of northern New England botany. Nothing gold can stay also shows that Frost was attempting a new sort of poem in Fanconi a one that was short highly compressed. Only one stanza long in its final version. The lyric speaks volumes about the transience of seasons and the limits of human life. Major's first green is gold her hardest. You can hold. Her early Leaf's a flower. But only salt an hour

then leaf subsides to leave. So even sighing to grief. So Dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Robert Frost found that the weather did not always favor his attempts to raise vegetables in from Konya. He learned to study the sky over Mount Lafayette early each morning to see whether the day would bring sun or rain. During the late summer. He began to look for a downward flow of cold air off of the mountains. Which might carry a dreaded frost. One summer his fourth unfriend pony and he was surprised to discover signs of a hard frost. In the middle of June. Our thermometer dropped a twenty five night before last and thirty last night losing us all I received in a month's growth. He wrote to a friend. The small farmers wrapped their gardens up in their own clothes and bed clothes.

A lot of good it did. My favorite tomato Rose right in my heavy overcoat. From such New Hampshire experiences Frost again the special understanding about the dark side of nature in northern New England and understanding which he revealed in his friend Kone a poem the need of being versed in country things. In the poem Fire and the harsh wind combined together to burn a farmhouse down to the ground. Leaving only the chimney standing. The only thing that prevents the nearby barn from burning down too is nature's whimsy. What Frost calls the will of the wind. It's due to Phoebe's that fly in and out of the barns broken windows expressed in their cry the sadness nature feels for such loss. Anyone versed in country things Frost tells us would disbelieve Phoebe's well. Yeah.

The house had gone to bring again to the midnight sky. A sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood like a pistol after the battle scarred. The barn opposed across the way that would have joined the house in flames had it been the will of the wind was left.

To bear forsaken the place's name. No more it opened with all one end. 14 came by the stony road. The drum on the floor with scurrying hoves. And brushed them all with the summer load. Of birds that came to it through the air. Broken windows. Blew out and in their murmur more like the side we sigh. From too much quarreling on what has been. For them a lilac. And the aged Elm touched with fire. And the dry palm flung up an awkward arm. And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them. There was really nothing sad. Though they rejoiced in the nest they kept. One had to be versed in country things not to believe. While Robert Frost lived in Franconia he wrote some of his best poems and made some of his most compelling statements about poetry in a letter to his friend Louis Untermeyer he declared a poem begins as a lump in the throat of homesickness. I love sickness. Later he told an interviewer about the value to poetry of everyday spoken

language as a picture gives its message to the eye. So the conversational tones of words have their special message for the ear. The importance of a conversational language is one of frost favorite themes both before and during his Franco New Years. In one of his letters on the subject he included a poem which would later appear in his friend Kone a volume of mountain interval published in 1916 titled A patch of snow. It was one of the briefest only two sentences long. There's a patch of old snow in a corner that I should have guessed was a blown away paper. The rain had brought to rest. It is speckled with grime as if a small print overspread it. The news of the day. I've forgotten. If I ever read it.

The first sentence is merely ordinary in book Age but the effectiveness of the second sentence is in the very special tone with which you must say. In that second sentence. There is a special tone with which you must say news of the day. If I ever read it. You must be able to say oh yes one knows how that goes. Notice also he said there are in the poem certain points of recognition. Patch of old snow. You know what that is. You know what a blow away newspaper is it's never the job of the poet to tell people something they don't know but something they know and hadn't thought of say. It must be something they recognize. The more Robert Frost himself came to know and recognise about the rural life of New Hampshire the more impatient he became with what he called guidebook poets whose knowledge of nature was superficial. Instead of dealing with the facts themselves frosted their dinner. Tony I

interviewed such poets brought pockets full of poetic adjectives like pockets full of peanuts carried into the park for the grey squirrel. Some years later Robert Frost wrote a little known but beautiful lyric titled The freedom of the moon. In that poem he took advice he gave poets in his interview on how to describe the movie. Don't lay on the emotions he said. When writing about the moon set yourself against it. If the moon's going to do anything to you it's up to the mood. I've tried the. Tilted in the air above a hazy

tree and Farmhouse cluster as you might try a jewel in your hair. I've tried it fine with a little breath of luster or in one ornament combining with one first. Water star almost as shining. I put it shining anywhere I please. I walking slowly on some evening later. I pulled it from a crate of crooked tree and brought it over glossy water crater. And dropped it in. And seen the image wall.

The color run. All sorts of wonder. As Robert Frost famed group quests for readings of poetry by and interviews with Yankee poet from New Hampshire increased. What was life and his friend Kone a farm like interviewers often wanted to know. After reading in Philadelphia in 1960 in the poet responded this way. My country is a milk and sugar country. We get what runs from the trees and what runs from the cows. You can't do much real farming. We have every month of the year. You know the white mountain farmers say they have 9 months of winter and 3. None so late in the fall. Though Robert Frost left his farm in Franconia in one hundred twenty five years after he'd moved there. He never forgot the place he called his country of milk and sugar.

When the poet was 75 years old he referred to it with affection as my one horse New England farm where I used to do everything including the milking. And these fourth volume a verse titled New Hampshire published in 1923. Frost recalled a friend combing the area in several poems. One was that Moonstruck lyric the freedom of the moon Another was a more somber verse. The census taker the poem describes the destruction left by a logging operation in a place of the sort frost must have seen on one of his long walks in the north country. The man describing the destruction in the poll is a census taker counting all by himself in the twilight of this world of waste. For us the narrator suggests the decay lost hopes and loneliness. Robert Frost sometimes found in the region north of Boston. Oh.

I came an hour and one cloud blowing evening to a slab built black paper covered house of one room and one window and one door. The only dwelling in a waste cut over a hundred square miles round it in the mountains and that not dwelled in now by men or women. Never had been dwelt in though by women. So what is this I make sorrow of. I came as a census taker to the waist to count the people in it and found none. None in the Hundred Miles none in the house where I came last with some hope but not much after hours over looking from the cliffs on emptiness flayed to the very stone. I found no people that dared show themselves

none not in hiding from the I would die. The time was autumn but how anyone could tell the time of year when every tree that could have dropped a leaf was down itself and nothing but the stump of it was left aisle bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch. And every tree up stood a rotting trunk without a single leaf to spend on autumn or branch to whistle after what was spent. Perhaps the wind the more without the help of breeding trees said something of the time of year or day. The way it swung the door forever off the latch. As if a rude man passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him. The next one to open for himself. I counted nine. I had no right to count but this was dreamy unofficial counting before I made the ten.

Across the threshold. Where was my supper. Where was anyone's. No lamp was left. Nothing was on the table. The stove was cold. Stove was off the chimney. Down by one side where it lacked a leg the people that had loudly passed the door were people to the rear but not the eye. They were not on the table with their elbows. They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks. I saw no men there and no bones of men myself against such as might be with a pitch black and stub of an axe handle I picked up the straw dust covered floor not bones the ill fitted window the door was still because I held it. I thought of what could be done about the people there.

This house in one year filled me with no less sorrow than the houses falling to ruin. Ten thousand years Asia Africa and Europe. Nothing was left that I could see that there was no one there and the cliffs the places desert and whoso lurks in silence in this break silence now or before ever silent. Let him say so. The Melancholy of having to count souls where they grow fewer and fewer every year is extreme with a wink to none at all. It must be I want life to go on living. During a two year stay in England where Robert Frost wrote his first two books of verse. He wrote to a friend of the return he planned to New Hampshire. I should get me

a farm. He said. Well between milking one cow and another I shall write book three four and five. The farm frost. Ultimately God was located of course in Franconia. While the poet did not remain there to write books three and four. He did finish the poems of his third book. And still other poems of finally appeared in later books. Some of those poems were short and highly compressed. Others contain the lively tones of conversation and almost all of the people places or nature of northern New England life life. That fast life his census taker hoped would go on living. Starting out in Derry and carrying on his friend Kone a fire among the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Robert Frost wrote poems that were both local and universal.

And threw them fixed his own high place in poetry. Robert Frost in the country of milk and sugar has been made possible in part by a grant from the New

Hampshire State Council on the arts.