9 - An Afterword

Summary

This short collection was published as part of The Complete Poems of Robert Frost 1949, just two years after the collection Steeple Bush appeared. Now seventy-five years old, Frost continued to travel, teach, and receive honorary degrees. Two years earlier, as part of his responsibilities as a father and grandfather, Frost was obliged to have his daughter Irma, who showed many of the same symptoms as did his sister Jeanie, committed to a state mental hospital out of concern for her and the welfare of her young son.

The two long poems, “Choose Something Like a Star” and “From Plane to Plane” are rich in both observational and theoretical astronomical content. In “Choose Something Like a Star” Frost draws upon his knowledge of fundamental concepts of astrophysics to relate a star's color to its temperature and chemical composition. And in the poem “From Plane to Plane” Frost blends humor and story-telling with his knowledge of the stars to present and resolve a riddle based on the constellations of the Zodiac. An Afterword was the last collection Frost would publish before his final volume In the Clearing was published in 1962.

“Choose Something Like a Star ”

11. 11–13. Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’ / But say with what degree of heat. / Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade: When Frost was a student in the 1890s, scientists did not yet have the tools to measure the temperature of the sun, or any other star, but a footnote in his astronomy textbook reports that “the prevailing opinion sets it between 5,000° and 10,000°C; i.e., from 9,000° to 20,000°F.” Modern methods place the temperature of a yellow sun like ours at about 10,000°C, while cooler stars are about 5,000°C and hotter blue stars are over 50,000°C.

Scientists did not have the ability to determine the temperature of a star based on the light it emitted until 1900 when the German physicist Max Planck solved a crucial problem relating to what was known as “blackbody radiation,” the temperature-dependent pattern of light emitted from an object. By modifying existing mathematical expressions to include concepts from quantum mechanics, Planck obtained a robust equation that permitted astronomers to determine the temperature of a star based on its spectrum.