When Steeple Bush was published in 1947, two years after A Masque of Reason, the critics were not kind and, despite being a four-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, the seventythree- year-old Robert Frost was crushed. Why the negative reception? Perhaps readers were not ready for a volume of poetry that begins with loving descriptions of young trees and flower-filled meadows and ends in visions of nuclear war. Perhaps they were disturbed to read about an entire culture that disappeared into a dusty hillside or a village whose residents abandoned it for unknown reasons, leaving behind empty homes and neglected toys. Perhaps the thought of scanning the sky for meteors, stars, and the aurora borealis as if looking for cosmic order made readers uneasy. And perhaps contemplating man's distant future, either on earth or in space, was too unsettling for readers who were just starting to enjoy their lives after the deprivations of World War II.

Steeple Bush begins with the type of poems about nature and farming, including “A Young Birch” and “Something for Hope,” that we are accustomed to from earlier collections, then quickly transitions to darker, more threatening subjects. For example, in the poems “One Step Backward Taken,” and “Too Anxious for Rivers” we watch helplessly as the natural processes of flooding and erosion weaken the ground beneath us. Frost also invites us to look upward, at a sky filled with the sun, moon, stars, and the Northern Lights. Meteors, the most fleeting of astronomical events, appear in several poems, including “An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box,” “Were I in Trouble,” “On Making Certain Anything Has Happened,” and “Bravado.” The perpetual dance of our closest celestial neighbors, the sun and moon, is portrayed in the poem “Two Leading Lights.” And Frost imagines what it would be like to live in the Arctic in the charming poem “In the Long Night.”

Frost's interest in archeology emerges in the poems “To an Ancient” and “A Cliff Dwelling,” when he challenges us to look not up or down, but into the past, to contemplate the fate of people who now exist only as artifacts or passed-down memories.