I donβt mind being made controversial. No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.
βRobert Frost to Lionel Trilling, June 18, 1959
It was Frostβs custom to prefix to successive issues of his collected poems βThe Pasture,β an invitationβoriginally published in North of Bostonβinto his pastoral world of bucolic delights:
Iβm going out to clean the pasture spring;
Iβll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shaβnβt be gone long.βYou come too.Iβm going out to fetch the little calf
Thatβs standing by the mother. Itβs so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shaβnβt be gone long.βYou come too.
This charming and seductive little poem I have always felt to be misleading. It promises something very interesting to see, without any labor; it guarantees a diversion, but one not overlong in its attraction; and it offers us the companionship, even the protective beneficence, of a kindly speaker who seems to know both what his work is and what our limits are in watching him do it. It is on the basis of poems like thisβand there are a great many of themβthat Frost attained the reputation of being a genial farmer-poet. Most readers of poetry in his time did not tire of watching Frost at his upcountry work. For remarkable poems came to record