In Emphasizing The Heartlessness of corporate interests and the human costs of economic change, “The Death of the Hired Man” and “The Self-Seeker” map a divide straddled by Frost’s own sympathies and ambitions. Two more of the book’s dramatic poems, — “A Hundred Collars” and “The Black Cottage” — further illuminate Frost’s conflicted feelings about the Derry neighbors that, by 1904, were already becoming the subject of his poems. As these two narratives — one mainly dialogue, the other nearly a monologue — portray the social and economic hardship he witnessed in his Derry years, they reflect the discrepancies in wealth and status, education and sensibility that inevitably separated Frost from the very people to whom he felt a deep connection, yet also connected him to those from whom he felt apart.

“A Hundred Collars”: The Pursuit of Happiness and Its Costs

“A Hundred Collars” presents a charged and, at moments, comic encounter between two characters — Dr. Magoon, a university professor waiting for a train to his country place and Lafe, a newspaper agent on his weekly rounds — who find it necessary to share a hotel room for a few hours late at night. Though they speak only a few minutes and will probably never meet again, each feels his mettle tested and his self-esteem at stake in the exchange. And rubbing each other the wrong way, each exposes the other’s native grain.

Though neither character resembles Frost in an overt way, each feels the experience of being caught between cultures that Frost suffered, enjoyed, and would trade on throughout his poetic career. Magoon, the “great scholar,” is one whose intellectual achievements have made him part of the high-culture and cash nexus that Frost may have despised but whose wealth and privilege he longed to break into, if only for the sake of his poetry. Could he gain that success without losing himself to it? Though a country man by birth — not, like Frost, by adoption — Magoon is nonetheless cut off from his origins. The “little town” that “bore him … / … doesn’t see him often.” He sends his wife and children back there mainly without him — the children to run just “a little wild.” Magoon, concerned with his dignity, is estranged by his self-importance.