Often enough in Frost human will is set against the challenges of a larger chaos. The conflict of will and environment—or will against will—is suggested in the muted allusion of the title A Boy’s Will to Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth.” Frost echoes the line “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and in so doing reveals his desire to work within a popular “fireside” tradition while also subverting it. How much force does the individual will have against the chaotic forces of the “wind’s will”? Frost once wrote that all his poems “are figures of the great predicament, the will braving alien entanglements.” In “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” we learn that in addition to a house that burned down, the “barn opposed across the way” would have “joined the house in flame/Had it been the will of the wind.” Capricious and destructive, the wind becomes a figure of chance and change that also suggests the incomprehensible and manifestly inhuman presence Job heard and saw from the whirlwind. Wind figures powerfully in many of the poems of A Boy’s Will, including “Storm Fear,” “To the Thawing Wind,” “A Line-Storm Song,” “Reluctance,” and “Pan with Us,” in which Pan, the ancient god of nature and of poetry, recognizes sadly that the poet’s pipes have little more power to stir than “the merest aimless breath of air.” Yet, in “To the Thawing Wind,” the speaker enlists the wind’s power to threaten his comfort and drive him into nature: “Melt the glass and leave the sticks/Like a hermit’s crucifix;/Burst into my narrow stall; /Swing the picture on the wall;/Run the rattling pages o’er; /Scatter poems on the floor;/Turn the poet out of door.” The stunning poems with which the volume concludes—“Now Close the Windows,” “A Line-Storm Song,” “October,” “My Butterfly,” and “Reluctance”—all take the will of the wind as a blind demiurge of life, death, and loss in the figures of scattered flowers and dead leaves. In “A Line-Storm Song,” the wind and storm suggest the threat and fear of primordial extinction against which love must work:

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

The power of love here is invoked against the extinguishing threat of deluge; love returns to overcome the ancient threat. A Boy’s Will concludes with “Reluctance,” the heart and the will resisting “the end/Of a love or a season,” as the speaker is worn down at the end of his journey. The speaker, like the leaves, has suffered a fall, and the breaking of will. Reluctant to give up, he meditates on the tension between the heart’s desire and the limits of the physical body, captured in the grim pun of choice, “whither”: