Both “The Death Of The Hired Man” and “The Self-Seeker” portray the antagonism between the rural New England culture championed by Frost and the industrial capitalism with which his literary ambitions required an alliance. “A Hundred Collars” offers two characters, Lafe and Magoon, who in their different ways reflect Frost’s position between these opposed forces. Of all Frost’s North of Boston protagonists, the one most like the poet himself is the minister of “The Black Cottage,” whose relation to the widow reflects Frost’s own relations to his Derry neighbors, and who must, like Frost, steer a course between his own idealism and economic necessity. In further and often more oblique ways, many other North of Boston poems reflect Frost’s uneasy position between his former Derry neighbors and the social-economic position he was striving to reach by means of his second book. At the same time, most of these poems remind us of the demographic changes, felt keenly in northern New England, that intensified problems endemic to small-scale farming and contributed to the drama of disappearance traced by North of Boston as a whole.

“A Servant to Servants”

“A Servant to Servants,” for example, provides a revealing moment in a conversation between the farm wife and the amateur botanist who is camping on her land at the edge of Vermont’s Lake Willoughby. The poem is a monologue, its form reflecting the distressed, obsessive outpouring of the woman, who carries burdens of more than one kind. If she and her husband Len have ever farmed seriously, they have had to look beyond farming to eke out a living and now maintain a crew of hired men for road work and other town projects, boarding the men in their home, so that it falls to the wife to feed and clean up after them. She and Len live with the hope that someone will rent the tourist cabins Len has built or that their lakeshore land will yet prove to “be worth something,” though the wife is quick to add, “I don’t count on it as much as Len.” Exhausted and demoralized by her daily tasks, she says with Calvinist fatalism at the end of her monologue, “I sha’n’t catch up in this world, anyway.