No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

EXPLANATORY NOTES

1 A BOY’S WILL: Cf. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “My Lost Youth” (1858): “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.” A Boy’s Will was first published in 1913 in London by David Nutt with the dedication “To E. M. F.” (Elinor Miriam Frost, the poet’s wife).

2 the edge of doom: Cf Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”), lines 11-12: “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,/But bears it out even to the edge of doom.”

3 Rose Pogonias: Small orchids found in the eastern United States and known as snake mouth pogonias because of their open pink flowers like a snake’s mouth and spear-shaped leaves.

4 worn book . . . song: Golden Treasury of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language (1861; rev. 1897), edited by Francis Turner Palgrave; one of Frost’s favorite anthologies.

5 a bright green snake: Cf. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1816), line 549, where a bard reports his surprise in a dream: “When lo! I saw a bright green snake.”

6 Wide fields of asphodel fore’er: In Greek myths, those favored of the gods lived on in Elysium, also known as the Plain of Asphodel. The asphodel is a member of the lily family and has a yellow flower. It is often associated with death.

7 The Demiurge’s Langh: Demiurge is the name for the Maker or Creator of the world in the Platonic philosophy; later, in Gnostic religion, it was conceived as a being subordinate to the Supreme Being, and sometimes as the author of evil.

8 NORTH OF BOSTON: First published in 1914 with the dedication “To E. M. F. THIS BOOK OF PEOPLE” and “The Pasture” as a prologue. E. M. F. is Elinor Miriam Frost.

9 Mending Wall: The title poem of his fourth book, New Hampshire, refers to Napoleon Guay (pronounced “Gay”), a French-Canadian farmer who inspired “The Ax-Helve” and “Mending Wall.”