But the most notable thing about the poem is how it addresses the reader: “You come too.” It’s an invitation, as I said, a tactic that is unusual enough in lyric poetry. But it’s also an aggressively conspicuous invitation. When we see a quatrain whose first three lines rhyme abb, we’re expecting the final line to rhyme with the first—abba—completing what’s sometimes called an envelope stanza. (Just think how much more smoothly the first half of this poem would flow if its last line were something like “The oldest songs are easiest to sing.”) But here the refrain breaks the anticipated pattern, throwing the words “You come too” into a relief that is heightened by their departure from the poem’s previously iambic rhythm. Moreover, while the phrase “You come too” appears to be a suggestion (Why don’t you come too?), it’s equally possible to read it as a straightforward observation (You are coming too) or even a directive (You must come too). The reader necessarily “comes too” because the ostentatious ordinariness of the writing (which is predicated on our own patterns of speech) is what makes the pasture and “The Pasture” possible. The reader goes along—we go along—because we’re simultaneously solicited, acknowledged, and compelled.

This is a lot of effort to expend on one’s audience, and it runs strongly counter to the practice of Frost’s most talented peers. For example, the opening remarks a reader finds on the first page of Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) are six untranslated lines from Dante’s Inferno, which is about as far from saying “You come too” as a poet can get. It’s perhaps to be expected that Eliot and Frost remained unimpressed with each other until late in their lives. Frost, aggressive as always, mocked Eliot’s pretensions for years (“I play euchre. He plays Eucharist”), and Eliot early on belittled Frost as “specializing in New England torpor.” The tension between them was perhaps best outlined by Frost in a letter to John Bartlett in 1913 that addressed the ambitions of Eliot’s great friend and promoter, Pound:

There is a kind of success called “of esteem” and it butters no parsnips. It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. . . . I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviare to the crowd the way my quasi-friend Pound does. I want to reach out.