Poetry comes to life at the Robert Frost Farm
DERRY, N.H. — Each spring more than a century ago, Robert Frost’s neighbor insisted on repairing the stone wall crumbling between their two properties. He told Frost, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost later immortalized those words in his poem, “Mending Wall,” while countering them with his own opposing views on barriers.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out...
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
“Mending Wall” is only one of many poems inspired by Frost’s years living on a 30-acre farm in Derry from 1900 to 1911. There he tended 300 chickens with his wife, Elinor, as well as raising four children. While Frost never took to the farming life, he fully absorbed its aura, injecting the flavor of rural New England into some of the best-loved poems in the English language.
Today, the Robert Frost Farm Historic Site — a New Hampshire state park — is surprisingly little known or publicized. But if you have the soul of a poet and a penchant for the outdoors, it will offer you an idyllic escape and a conduit back to the first poetry you might have encountered.
When he arrived in Derry, Frost was in his late 20s and had not yet gained traction as a poet. He was slipping through life from job to job. Frost’s stalwart grandfather, recognizing his grandson’s aimlessness, bought him the Derry farm (and the poultry) on the condition that Frost and his family live there for a minimum of 10 years. Frost agreed, devoting himself to homeschooling the children with Elinor and — eventually — to writing verse.
The farmhouse, itself, is open midMay to mid-October, with a one-hour guided walk-through.
There is Frost’s tilt-back Morris chair, with his imprint still in the cushion, and Elinor’s washboard, specially fitted with glass rather than metal to be gentler on the fingers. And the Glenwood wood-burning stove, which warmed the family on many a freezing night. In the barn, time slips backward as a 15-minute video features the late poet laureate reciting his own verse. On assorted Thursdays this year, the barn morphs into modern times as presentday poets narrate their own work.
The site’s most engaging attractions, however, are free of charge and located outdoors along a half-mile “poetry loop,” open dawn to dusk, 365 days a year. This self-guided walking trail wends its way among the lawns, woodlands, pastures, and stone walls of the farm, passing 14 signposts that marry Frost’s poetry to actual sites along the way. There, for example, you will come upon the very wall that gave rise to “Mending Wall,” and other ordinary spots that the poet elevated to worldwide fame. (Frost, himself, acknowledged in a letter, “The core of all my writing was probably the five free years I had on the farm.”) There is the fork in the path where a signpost informs you of “the road not taken.” Will you take “the one less traveled by?” And there are two gnarled apple trees that remain from the 100-tree apple, peach, and quince orchard of Frost’s day — an orchard that later inspired the poem “After Apple-Picking”:
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill… Magnified apples appear and disappear…
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
And bordering the farm are the very that the poet passed through with his horse and wagon on the evening of Dec. 21, 1905, on his way to Derry Village to Christmas shop. Frost remembered the exact date as he experienced an epiphany on that night of the solstice. Just scraping by, it abruptly struck him that he did not have money enough to buy the gifts for his children. Distraught, he halted his horse in the snow. It was the genesis of his American masterpiece, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. While stopped silently in the woodland by the farmhouse, Frost understood that it was time to establish financial stability in his life. (He followed through, garnering a teaching post at nearby Pinkerton Academy.) He also noticed that it was getting late, and that he should hurry on his way. Both realizations impart double interpretation to the final lines of his poem, elevating common experience to more profound meaning:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.