And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question “Whither?”

A Boy’s Will begins and ends with poems about journeys. But the journey remains circular, following not a linear path but a cycling of seasons that begins and ends with autumn, that mythically provocative season of the fall. In Genesis God breathed on the dust and made man a living soul. Frost often meditates on an old controversy of whether that “soul” and God’s “breath” are merely wind destined to die with the body. In Latin, the word for spirit, spiritus, is also the word for breath, wind, and inspiration. “The Aim Was Song” wavers between an affirmation and a parody of the romantic notion that man and art are the evolutionary fulfillment of nature’s inspiration. Perhaps we are only presences creating momentary order from otherwise indifferent forces. With dramatic extravagance that veers toward a fallacious just-so story, we learn that the “wind once blew itself untaught,” and then “Man came to tell it what was wrong”:

He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be—
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song—the wind could see.

The line “The wind the wind had meant to be”—with its repetition and monosyllables—seems to force intention and meaning to the brink of tautology (as does the remarkable fifteenth line of the sonnet “Hyla Brook”: “We love the things we love for what they are.”). The phrase “a little through the lips and throat” sounds like a mock advertisement for gum or chewing tobacco. Be that as may be, “the lips and throat” are not the soul or the will but the body acting as small, physical instrument. If the “aim was song,” was it really the wind’s or just our own? The final phrase of the poem “the wind could see” (for it sees nothing) is an example of the way Frost pricks the balloon of our desire to see our aims confirmed by nature or by God.