Robert Frost Keeps Me Company Often Uninvited

As a country lawyer filling my retirement days with landscape painting and outdoor chores, my mind is free to wander. Quite recently I was struck by the fact that bits and snatches of Robert Frost's poetry were popping up in my memory, unbidden, and recurring with remarkable frequency something like a tune you can't get out of your head. It's becoming apparent to me that Frost's poems have somehow got themselves woven into the very fabric of my mind. I can even hear him "saying" his poems the word he always used.

That Frost is alive and well and rambling through my thoughts may be due in large part to the fact that I live in New Hampshire and make frequent excursions into Vermont. It is, after all, his country, and its changing seasons and cast of characters breed an association of ideas.

In mud time I was splitting wood, feeling warm one minute and cold the next, when the lines beginning, "You know how it is with an April day," began unmercifully to tease my memory. Finally I had to lay down the ax, go into the house, and take down his book to get it straight: You know how it is with an April day When the sun is out and the wind is still, You're one month on in the middle of May.

But if you so much as dare to speak, A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, A wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.

Having thus re-read "Two Tramps in Mud Time," I went back to splitting wood as Frost had been doing when interrupted by those lumberjack tramps. Although I've used an ax all my life, I felt a little self-conscious if I failed to strike where I aimed because Frost's lines had just said, They judged me by their appropriate tool.

Except as a fellow handled an ax They had no way of knowing a fool.

And, as I looked around me at the spring-time yard, I muttered to myself: Be glad of water, but don't forget The lurking frost in the earth beneath That will steal forth after the sun is set And show on the water its crystal teeth.

Back in March, I had watched our own hillside thaw, and I had been transfixed not only by the sight itself, but by Frost's description of it that begins: To think to know the country and not know The hillside on the day the sun lets go Ten million silver lizards out of snow!

But now the spring is really coming along, and as I walk out in the evening I hear the peepers in the marshes "like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow" surely one of Frost's most magical lines.

Whenever I hear a thrush in the woods at twilight I am pulled up short. Although I'm well aware that the things Stephen Vincent Benet and Henry David Thoreau said about the song of a thrush were among the best things they ever said on any subject, yet when I hear a thrush it is not their fine words that come to mind but just a few of the simple lines from Frost's "Come In": As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music hark! Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark.

Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament.

Last winter we had one of our old reliable ice-storms that sheathed every tree and bent the birches down. Could one possibly view the scene without being reminded of "Birches" and re-reading it for the umpteenth time? That would be no more possible than going to Gettysburg and never thinking of the battle or of Lincoln's speech there. How accurately Frost described the scene! And how well that poem illustrates his remarks recorded in a famous essay about creating a poem:."lt begins in delight and ends in wisdom .... For me the initial delight is the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew."

We see enough of snow in northern New England to remind us constantly of Frost's little gems about it. In "The Onset" he describes the winter's first storm: Always the same, when on a fatednight At last the gathered snow lets down as white As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground.

One can't go through a winter with out recalling his most popular poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," especially the hypnotic last lines: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

And in his "Evening in a Sugar Orchard" he says: The moon, though slight, was moon enough to show On every tree a bucket with a lid, And on black ground a bear skin rug of snow.

Early every fall, when the enervating heat of summer is waning, a bracing front of Canadian air comes sweeping in, and when that happens I just have to read "Clear and Colder."

But it's not only the climate and changing seasons that keep Frost circulating in my reveries. Often it's his cast of characters. I once met a man in Bolton, Vermont who picked spruce gum for a living. I don't believe you'll find many poets who have dealt with that occupation. But Frost does in "The Gum-Gatherer," and every time I think of the opening lines it's as refreshing as a walk in mountain air: There overtook me and drew me in To his downhill, early-morning stride, And set me five miles on my road Better than if he had had me ride, A man with a swinging bag for load And half the bag wound round his hand.

We talked like barking above the din Of water we walked along beside.

I used to turn a grindstone for a man who liked to keep his axes sharp, and every time that memory comes back to me I have to re-read "The Grindstone" for a never-failing laugh.

Whenever I see a craftsman taking the utmost pains I always think of Baptiste in "The Ax-Helve" who insisted on making Frost an ax handle: But now he brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the ax there on its horse's hoof, Erect, but not without its waves, as when The snake stood up for evil in the Garden Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little a French touch in that. Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased: "See how she's cock her head!"

And there's always the haunting memory of that old man in his lonely house at night who found himself down cellar but couldn't remember why he'd gone there "And having scared the cellar under him/In clomping here, he scared it once again/In clomping off . . .

There were plenty of good poets contemporary with Frost Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sara Teasdale, for example. All of them could ring chimes in your head and send warmth through your veins. (They weren't like the present elite breed of non-communicating puzzlers.) But it's Frost who gets into your bloodstream and crams your days with inevitable, no-escape reminders. You meet him around every mental corner. Often he bugs you with half-remembered lines that make you lay down whatever you're doing just to look them up.

Anyone in his mature years whose mind is free to ramble back over his life is bound to see, as I do, so many road forks where a choice had to be made, and you get to wondering how things would have been if you had taken the other road. When you start musing along this line how can you avoid thinking of "The Road Not Taken"? Every time two roads diverged, isn't each of us sorry he "could not travel both/And be one traveler"?

Frost "took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." But taking the more traveled one makes a lot of difference, too, and who is to say if it's a good difference or a bad one? Whichever one you take (or took) you may well say, "Yet knowing how way leads on to way/I doubted if I should ever come back." Once you start reminiscing this way, you see so plainly the picture the poem paints and feel so keenly the mood it creates.

Mark Twain said, "What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself." Well, while leading your real life in your head, it's most desirable to have good company there. Robert Frost makes about the best company you're likely to find, even if uninvited part of the time. Why, here he is now! Brother Frost, come right in! I don't mind your insisting on having your say. I'd a little rather you would. What's that you say "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,They have to take you in." Make yourself right at home even if it is in my head.

In 1953 at the age of 49, an exhausted Ken Andler was advised by his doctor to slow down a bitand find himself a hobby, perhaps painting. As Andler's delightful' 'Robert Frost Stopping byWoods on a Snowy Evening'' (above) indicates, writing about poetry is not the only way to useone's powers of observation. This painting, incidentally, executed in 1978, was one of severallandscapes exhibited in a recent one-man show.

Kenneth Andler '26 lives in his hometownof Newport, N.H. where he practiced lawfor some 40 years. A surveyor in his youth,Andler also worked for the U.S. Coast andGeodetic Survey all the way from Maine toCalifornia.