But, having entered in,
Great growth and small
Show them to men akin—
Combatants all!
Sycamore shoulders oak,
Bines the slim sapling yoke,
Ivy-spun halters choke
Elms stout and tall.

The wanderer’s perception of nature’s cruelty leads to the revelation that at least the human world might provide more, or at least some solace after all. Something could be saved by returning to humanity if one recognizes the terror in the rest of nature:

Since, then, no grace I find
Taught me of trees,
Turn I back to my kind,
Worthy as these.
There at least smiles abound,
There discourse trills around,
There, now and then, are found
Life-loyalties.

Frost’s conclusion in “Dust of Snow” may be more ambiguous than Hardy’s, perhaps accepting of what are only “now and then” “Life-loyalties.” Hemlock trees kill anything that grow in their shade. Crows eat the seeds that burst from the hemlock’s buds in winter. Birth, death, competition, and struggle found in nature mute the excesses of regret over the pain we find in human life.

The title of Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will, and its keynote poem, “Into My Own,” evoke an American faith in the heroic qualities of the youthful individual, escaping the bonds and mediocrity of traditional society and heading out into the territory ahead; he follows the liberating mission of the Puritans and their “errand into the wilderness.” From the beginning, Frost’s handling of this American mythology is fraught with ironies that suggest not “rugged” but what he called “ragged individualism.” In “Into My Own,” the speaker cannot do anything, only “wish” it. “Will” manifests its destiny only in the form of the hypothetical “should” and “would”:

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheels pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

Though he doesn’t see why he “should e’er turn back,” the thoughts of those “who should miss me here/And long to know if still I held them dear” remind him and the reader of the persistence of what he wishes to escape, of the real hold that others have upon the self. The desire for individual freedom in Frost always meets the challenges of our need to be social, to be loved, and sets limits on going too far in thought and in art. As he wrote in appreciation of the poetry of Amy Lowell: “The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains. The breathless swing is between subject matter and form.” And the adventure would produce nothing but the testing of convictions which he had from the beginning—or so he hopes: “They would not find me changed from him they knew—/Only more sure of all I thought was true.” This vision of a heroic individual wandering in the wilderness is tested in a number of poems in A Boy’s Will and in his subsequent books: “A Dream Pang,” “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” “The Trial by Existence,” “Reluctance,” and later “The Wood-Pile,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and, of course, “The Road Not Taken.”