A pastoral poem touches on life's hardships

In a poem by Robert Frost, “The Pasture,” written in two verses, Frost offers a claim to all of us. As he said here, composed in 1915, he offers something about whom he was as a poet, something rather intangible, that he bespoke about himself, before what he took to the road before his frequent readings. 

In “The Pasture,” he offers a rural bit of dialogue, almost preparing to do the rough hewn labor as a farm worker, as he well understood, but first there was a quizzical question or theory about himself and someone else:

“I shan’t be gone long. — You come too.”

In a rural place, such as New Hampshire, there was this difficulty of earning a living: yes, there was a restaurant culture, then and now, maybe even a small town and tiny factories, for all the accoutrements of life. 

But this was a lot less than the knitting mills or some of the box brands or fancy stores of the Northeast. In a small town, he saw himself, mostly alone, always in an apparent but delightful apprehension, seeing just a bit of himself in “A Boy’s Will,” the title of his first book.

Frost saw something, as a part of the hardscrabble men and women who grew unique to a somewhat isolated life on, whatever, was defined by this mountainous region. 

This is your land, too, Frost said to know one.   

It belongs to you, whoever you happen to be.  Sure, maybe it was part of that conditioned self, just a bit of our life, a piece of ourselves that pronounces who we were or are; yes, it belongs to you. 

There is labor for you, here, in “The Pasture,” even as a then-39-year-old Robert Frost observed, cleaning up the leaves, in sorting it in piles with a rake and nothing else — off into a little mound — and catching a glimpse of some thin-etching water immersed on the slippery grass, so we guess, just as Frost perceived.

Of course, surely, this is your land, too, just a scrappy field, just a place to hide away, and forget who even owns it or what part of it you are on, one might question, or just a little place over there or over here. 

Yes, a place where several cows with a little calf might hide out, too, until we might hear their sounds.

Maybe you might live there, too, residing possibly nearby, and then you could care about the hills and mountains and the spring waters: you could, then, “watch the water clear,’ as Frost would say. 

And this is how and why we are compelled by Frost’s poems, and throughout his 11 books of poetry, and we always will need him: to help us remember about who we are.

“You come too.”

Of course, Frost’s poem makes us recall some other saintly people: it is about my young mother and other immigrants, waiting to grow ever more old in America, reliving Frost’s title, “North of Boston,” where she and others lived, searching for themselves.  

In one such city, Lawrence, Frost graduated from high school, and his search was marked out. 

How it makes me appreciate our tiny flat, our resident in our own urban place, and a place not too far from that rolling and hilly terrain: however nice it might have been to at least visit, but that hardly could be enjoyed.  (Alas, we never “imagined,” right near the uplands of New Hampshire, places that orbited from us a different ken.)

So true, we lived a very narrow life, and we resorted with our neighbors, equally caught up in our urban mentality, but barely able to distinguish a humble life that appeared beyond us. (So we thought.)  

So true, we were so like our parents and grandparent or a great-grandparent, as though we came from a different world, which of course it was.   

Such was the scheme of our minds, so we imagined.

But we had nature, too, and it marked us in very special ways, so special that I must share a piece of it with you.

Others and my mother fed the birds, on a street of three-deckers, and there were simply hordes of pigeons, a cavalcade of them. And we were lucky to care for them, if that is what we surely did.

Who could forget the neighborhood kid who lived nearby?  A young boy, about 12 or 13, who lived in a more fancy house and had a father who was a police officer during his day job but he had an evening job. He worked in a bagel company, churning out all kinds of bagels, and his son would, fortunately, drop off three or four dozen bagels after he worked. 

Here, my mother took over. She boiled the water, soaked the bagels through and through, and then stepped out in the street, so that all my neighbors could readily observe. A flock of pigeons descended and filled the street with cooing and delightful belly sounds of black and white and a multicolored cornucopia of varieties of pigeons, and rooms for other blackbirds and an occasional crow, too, completely in awe of my mother’s humble talents: it was their time to eat.

 And this went on endlessly, for two years, three years or more, or until the bagel kid got older and moved on.

My mother became the bagel queen, feeding countless pigeons, such that even when my mother walked to a nearby store, down the street, pigeons spied her from the three-deckers. She was a queen with pigeons flying over her head, so we thought.  

Now, I spot something a part of me, here, too: sparrow bird’s feet hang upon sloppy wires from the telephone pole, yes, a company that once existed, but now the company is gone. Gone in space, gone in the air, one might conclude that it never existed, however brief in a lifetime.  Or maybe there were two or three other financial expertise; who can say?    

But the sparrow seems not bothered or cared about finances: in their swinging motion, one bird or many more creatures, they seem occupied by their space.

Like the sparrow hanging on, you can see it, too: its tiny weight inches upon a single wire, moving it in the daytime swing. 

Robert Frost published his first book from England in 1913. Between 1913 and 1915, he had some success with his poetry, came back to the United States, and that became his extraordinary and notable career.

As a farmer and schoolteacher, Frost was immersed in rural life: but it was his ability to listen and learn and then to transmit an endless part of him.  “Two roads diverged” and “I took the one less traveled by.” 

And he married his co-valedictorian at Lawrence High School, Elinor White, equally committed to him and a poet's life.

Frost had it all marked out.

Richard Klayman, Ph.D., is the author of "A Generation of Hope, 1929-1941." The poem "The Pasture," by Robert Frost, is in the public domain.