A lantern light from deeper in the barn
Shone on a man and woman in the door
And threw their lurching shadows on a house
Near by, all dark in every glossy window.

A horse's hoofs pawed once the hollow floor,
And the back of the gig they stood beside

Moved in a little.

The creak and shift of the wheels is quite plain, although it is not indicated.

The form

fits the

matter

The secret of Mr. Frost's success in such passages as these, lies in his accurate observation, coupled with a perfect simplicity of phrase; the latter, an inheritance from a race brought up on the English Bible. He tells what he has seen exactly as he has seen it. He is never seduced into subtleties of expression which would be painfully out of place. His words are simple, straightforward, direct, manly, and there is an elemental quality in all he does which would surely be lost if he chose to pursue niceties of expression. For Mr. Frost has chosen his medium with an unerring sense of fitness. As there is no strange and expressive imaginative force playing over his subjects, so there is no exotic music pulsing through his verse,

The poems are written for the most part in blank verse, a blank verse which does not hesitate to leave out a syllable or put one in, whenever it feels like it. To the classicist, such liberties would be unendurable. But the method has its advantages. It suggests the hardness and roughness of New England granite. It is halting and maimed like the life it portrays, unyielding in substance, and broken in effect.

The small

canvas

In looking back over the three volumes which make up Mr. Frost's poetical output at present, we ask ourselves, what place does he hold among his contemporaries? I should say that he has gained a success in his chosen field which can be equalled by no other poet in our series. But his canvas is exceedingly small, and no matter how wonderfully he paints upon it, he cannot attain to the position held by men with a wider range of vision. As Jane Austen is perfect in her way, still we cannot rank her with

Shakespeare; nor can Theocritus ever be considered as great as Homer. Mr. Frost's work is undoubtedly more finished in its kind than the work of any other living American poet, but this very finish precludes growth. In some other poets we feel potentialities, in Mr. Frost we find achievement. Mr. Robinson represents realism; with a much broader imagination than Mr. Frost, this force is neverRealism theless held in check by an innate pessimism which makes the real seem important and the visions of imagination almost frivolous. Mr. Frost is realism touched to fire by idealization, but in the final count, and in spite of its great beauty, it remains realism. We have no such rare imaginative bursts from him as Mr. Masefield gives us time and again in "The Dauber"; for instance, the description of the flying fishes.

Mr. Frost's quality and rank

Mr. Frost writes down exactly what he sees. But, being a true poet, he sees it vividly and with a charm which translates itself into a beautiful simplicity of expression. He is an eminently sympathetic poet. He wins first by his gentle understanding, and his strong and unsentimental power of emotion; later, we are conquered by his force, and moved to admiration by his almost unapproachable technique. Still, his imagination is bounded by his life, he is confined within the limits of his experience (or at least what might have been his experience) and bent all one way like the wind-blown trees of New England hillsides. After all, art is rooted in the soil, and only the very greatest men can be both cosmopolitan and great. Mr. Frost is as New England as Burns is Scotch, Synge Irish, or Mistral Provençal, and it is perhaps not too much to say that he is the equal of these poets, and will so rank to future generations.

NOVEMBER HOST: A Footnote

By THE EDITOR

At April doors, all welcoming is still the spring's, and a guest admitted to an apathetic host can keep his own heart warm. In midsummer, if any house be shut against us, all the kind earth's gates remain open to our better entertainment. But in autumn, in November, we do not like to feel that any human door stands locked, or even to see one swing grudgingly and stop at the narrowness of a peering face. A visitor then to the stone cottage in Vermont will find Robert Frost's door latched against idle winds, but opening to sense and candor with these and something more. The poet's door is not grudging, his hand not withheld, nor merely an embered blue in the fire his eyes keep. The mood will be of outdoor plenitude and hearthside friendliness. The talk will be homely, but in the dusk of it will be felt a breathing from high solitudes of truth that seem to slope equally into earth and under stars. The poet is a right November host, and whatever place he dwells in is a "mountain interval."

Sincerity and originality characterize Robert Frost as man and artist, and these have won him the praise of discriminating critics and the affection of uncritical readers. Yet in him, as in every personality of depth, there flows an elusive understream that asks divination of some witch-hazel wand. One falls thinking, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness," and wonders why the story and drama in his poems are the things mainly talked about, though everyone knows we should look first in lyrics for the lyrist. Not that all Frost's lyrics are either intended or unintended self-portraits. The artist as such must have the histrionic power of entering into imagined or externally actual situations and personalities to the degree of being moved by them-deeper into himself sometimes, but also sometimes out of himself-and he will report that which has moved him. But even his impersonations and interpretations will somehow declare the artist himself, while often he

comes frankly without mask or 'Let's pretend," and if then we cannot take him fully he and we must be sorry.

It is not wholly absurd to prophesy that in some remote, more human day, after all men have long "builded better than they knew," every man will be his own poet. And then a very simple recipe will be chiefly followed: see vividly something in the external world of nature or of human life; be excited (but never, excite yourself!) over it; render it to the rhythms of the heart; and with this solid thing beneath the feet either rise in a closing lark-flight of personal passion or with all power in leash speak the brief creative words that turn grey phantoms into ruddy denizens of the household. This recipe is a secret opened with every book of poems: read it variously in Burns's "To a Mouse" and in Wordsworth's "Solitary Reaper," in Emerson's "Days" and Browning's "Two in the Campagna," in Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."

The formula may be traced too in "The Tuft of Flowers" by Robert Frost:

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,-alone,

"As all must be," I said within my heart,
"Whether they work together or apart."

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook.

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

"Men work together," I told him from the heart,
"Whether they work together or apart.""

This is universal art, and good art also in the Tolstoian sense because revealing "joy in widest commonalty spread."

The same tone, though not in so high a strain, rings through "The Road Not Taken." The last stanza runs:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

World-true, but less true for this poet than for many others. He is not one who could complain: "Oh last regret, regret can die!" A heartening example of the "sanity of art," Frost stands oaklike in the present and shrinks from no tomorrow, though he may ask October to delay "For the grapes' sake 'From A Boy's Will, Henry Holt & Co., 1915.