When life is too much like a pathless wood

England, why England?

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Robert Frost’s late start as a poet. This is a companion piece about why he moved to England, and what his poems tell us about that strange episode in his life.

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But why did Robert Frost move to England? Biographically, several answers can been given. His wife Elena wanted to go. She dreamed of living under thatch near Stratford. America had a paltry poetic culture and Frost needed to be at the heart of things. They simply wanted a change and flipped a coin for England or Vancouver. All of these explanations are true, but they are not all of the truth.

Frost had been a teacher, and a poultry farmer, living off a small income from his grandfather’s inheritance. This was limiting, trapping him up at the farm with little money. But it also freed him up to write poetry. And he did write, perhaps a hundred poems. He was, however, a natural discontent. Unhappy childhood, melancholic tendencies, difficulty sticking at anything. He chose to drop out of university twice. And he submitted relatively few of his poems to magazines.

He needed to be shaken out of himself.

Frost wrote about being shaken out of a reverie of melancholy in two of his most well known poems, “Stopping by Woods” and “Dust of Snow”.

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Something like this is what happened to Frost in England. Shortly after arriving there, he sat on a gate in a field, surrounded by mist; he later wrote a short poem about the experience in a letter. It is notable because it contains the first version of a line he used in “Birches”, but also because it expresses the same mood, the sense of being trapped in himself, needing to be shaken out.

This theme is there in the very first poem of A Boy’s Will, Frost’s first published collection.