Frost appears to urge, as he titled one poem, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.” The title tells us a great deal about the trickiness and subtlety of Frost’s work. Sounding like an invitation to homespun country wisdom, the title wryly alludes to Prince Hamlet’s response to Ophelia: “Do you think I meant country matters?” In the Elizabethan world, “country matters” implied “something indecent.” To an audience accustomed to poetry that pointed to nature as a source of solace or transcendent revelation, Frost no doubt meant something indecent by a poem that describes the inexplicable destruction of a farm by fire, its use by birds who “rejoice in the nest they kept” indifferent to human loss, and its rebuke of human sentimentality “dwelling too much on what has been.” “Versed,” a colloquialism that means “taught” or “schooled,” casually raises a question that haunts Frost’s work: What is the relation of poetry, “verse,” to knowledge of the world? If poetry had become the repository for sentiments and emotion, Frost’s poem suggests the need to unlearn our emotions in order to accept and survive in life’s cruelty. Our having “to be versed in country things/Not to believe the phoebes wept,” [emphasis mine] reflects the difficulty of accommodating human beliefs and desires to the indifference and coldness of the world.

Frost’s thoughtful and subversive attitude about country matters can be seen very clearly in a little-known interview. Asked whether he thought nature was cruel or not, Frost’s anecdotal answer reveals much about his ironic stance toward an educated and genteel audience. He takes exception with the view held by Matthew Arnold that nature is cruel and that man is somehow morally superior. But he takes special care to poke fun at an American minister and professor expounding to students on the peacefulness and beauty of nature:

I know it [nature] isn’t kind. As Matthew Arnold said: “Nature is cruel. It’s man that’s sick of blood.” And it doesn’t seem very sick of it. Nature is always more or less cruel. Shall I tell you what happened on the porch of a professor—minister he was, too? The war was going on, a beautiful moonlit night. He was there with some boys, talking about the horrors of war—how cruel men were to each other and how kind nature was, what a beautiful country this was spread beneath us, you know—moonlight on it. And just as he talked that way, spreading his arm over it, a bird began to shriek down in the woods—something had got into its nest. Nature was being cruel. The woods are killing each other anyway. That’s where the expression came from “a place in the sun.” A tree wanting a place in the sun it can’t get. The other trees won’t give it to it.