Frost’s dramatic poetry finds full development in North of Boston—narratives, dramatic monologues, ballads—all of which really draw on the ancient form of poetic dialogue known as eclogue, a debate between shepherds or rustics that explores the relations of work and play, haves and have-nots, power and fear. The only traditional lyric in North of Boston is “After Apple-Picking”; aside from the stunning dramatic monologue “A Servant to Servants,” all of the other poems are strikingly original hybrids of narrative, lyric, and dialogue that heighten the importance of circumstance and perspective in an ongoing drama of life. The tensions between characters in these poems reveal the instability of hierarchies and the tentativeness of power and control. In “The Tuft of Flowers” of A Boy’s Will, a farmworker whose task is to turn the hay after the mower has cut it asserts the bond between himself and his fellow worker: “ ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,/‘Whether they work together or apart.’ ” A footnote to “Mending Wall” in the first edition of North of Boston stated, “ ‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where the ‘Tuft of Flowers’ in A Boy’s Will laid it down.” Throughout the book, Frost addresses the possibility of shared experience of both work and play among men and women despite an uneasy awareness of life’s challenges and an anxiety about power and lack of equality. Frost enjoyed saying, “I am a great equalitarian. I try to spend most of my time with my equals.” Hardly an egalitarian, Frost nevertheless saw the way in which all human beings participate in what he called the “ritualism of nature,” its outdoor games for mortal stakes. In several of his narrative and eclogue poems, Frost’s most compelling characters are French-Canadian. Frost acknowledged that the character of “the old-stone savage” of “Mending Wall” and Baptiste of “The Ax-Helve” were inspired by a French-Canadian farmer named Napoleon Guay. Lafayette of “A Hundred Collars” enjoys teasing and threatening Professor Magoon (his name is telling) while finding his own wily ways to making a living and garnering power. The fact of the severe racism experienced by French-Canadians (related to a Protestant demonization of Catholics) haunts these poems. The “civilized” Yankee characters in these poems reveal their fears of losing power to their more “savage,” though often shrewder and wise, French-Canadian interlocutors. Unwilling to be sentimental about human nature, Frost depicts cunning and self-deception in all ranges of human life.