After his father died from tuberculosis, at age thirty-six—leaving behind eight dollars—Frost moved with his mother and sister to Lawrence, Massachusetts, where his father’s family lived. Frost was already eleven at the time, which means that a poet who would later be considered the personification of Yankee values actually spent the majority of his formative childhood years in a West Coast gold rush town. His mother taught school, and Frost quickly distinguished himself as a superb student and inordinately competitive athlete. He had a particular flair for Greek and Latin; as Jay Parini writes in Robert Frost: A Life, “His grades for 1888–89 included a 96 in Latin—something of a record for that era, when few students ever crossed the line into the 90s.”

Frost graduated from high school as co-valedictorian, a fierce, sensitive, and somewhat pompous young man (as might be expected from such a precocious student) whose address was entitled “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled.” His companion at the podium was Elinor White, whom Frost fell in love with and became determined to marry. Though his feelings were reciprocated—they were secretly engaged shortly after graduation—Elinor went on to St. Lawrence College, in Canton, New York, while Frost entered Dartmouth with the help of a scholarship and financial assistance from his grandfather, a textile mill supervisor. (Throughout the first half of his life, Frost would repeatedly have to rely on his grandfather’s largesse, a dependency that he came to resent.) Frost’s time in New Hampshire was brief. He left school after only a few months, unhappy with his isolation and disappointed that Elinor didn’t seem sufficiently agonized by his absence. He then returned to Lawrence, where he taught school, worked in one of the town’s several mills, and did his best to get Elinor to marry him.

She said she wasn’t ready yet, in part because she thought they should both complete their educations. So when the semester began, she went back to St. Lawrence and Frost immediately began to worry that she’d leave him for one of her fellow students. To forestall this, he had a booklet of five of his poems printed up and traveled to Canton to present it to Elinor, figuring that the gift would get her to change her mind about marriage, or at least get her to commit to him in a more satisfyingly definite way. Among the five poems was “My Butterfly,” which Frost wrote in 1893, at age nineteen, and which is often taken to be the first poem in which his distinctive touch is evident. (Frost himself called it his “first real poem.”) The conclusion is representative:

Then when I was distraught

And could not speak,

Sidelong, full on my cheek,

What should that reckless zephyr fling

But the wild touch of thy dye-dusty wing!

I found that wing broken to-day!

For thou art dead, I said,

And the strange birds say.

I found it with the withered leaves