1 - A Boy's Will

Summary

Published in 1913, when Frost was thirty-nine years old, A Boy's Will is rich in both realistic and fanciful descriptions of nature, farming, and rural life. Although the book was published shortly after the Frost family moved to England, the poetry is inspired by the ten years they spent on a thirty-acre farm carved out of the woods in Derry, a small town in southern New Hampshire.

The scientific language and imagery in A Boy's Will are based on observations of nature, both wild and tamed, and draw on his experiences as an amateur botanist, day and nighttime sky-watcher, and as a small farmer and family man. Taken together, the poems depict a man coming “into his own,” not only from boyhood to fatherhood, but from the wild freedom of bats, snakes, vines, and trees to the domesticated responsibilities of farm houses, fields, haycocks, and steers, all of which appear in this volume. Frost also lingers on the border of these two worlds, by reporting on the co-mingling of wild and domesticated plants and animals, most notably in “A Tuft of Flowers” and “Pan with Us.” And, finally, Frost foreshadows his departure from Derry in “Ghost House,” depicting a farm's transition from domesticated back to wild.

Frost owed much of what he knew about the natural world to his friend Carl Burrell, an experienced naturalist, who shared his expertise and his extensive book collection with the teen-aged Frost. Burrell's book collection contained practical handbooks for plant identification but also included works by Charles Darwin, best known for developing the theory of evolution, but also an engaging writer and observer of nature; Thomas Huxley, a fierce advocate of Darwin's theories; and Herbert Spencer, another nineteenth-century British biologist and proponent of evolutionary theory.

Frost's formal education beyond high school was limited to one semester at Dartmouth College and about two years as a special student at Harvard College. But his college studies in Latin, Greek, philosophy, and historical geology introduced him to ancient and modern theories of the earth and nature. Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, which he probably read in the original Latin, was a lifelong inspiration for Frost. Language and ideas about geological eras that emerge in Frost's poem “A Line-Storm Song” are poetic echoes of passages from his college geology textbook, Outlines of Earth's History, by Nathaniel Shaler.