When We Consider the design and coherence of Frost’s volume, we should almost be surprised if his uneasiness about the people of his book did not find expression in the first and last of its principal poems, as, in fact, it does. Both “Mending Wall” and “The Wood-Pile” — two of the three major lyrics that punctuate this volume — make overt though ostensibly joking references to theft. And though these accusations are buffered by elements of satire, hyperbole, and humor, they nonetheless convey a discomfort in the speakers of these poems that parallels the poet’s own feelings of debt for the poetic materials he had made his own.

The Lyric Constellation

To appreciate the ways that such accusatory references reflect Frost’s relation to his poetic subjects, we should recognize the role that the three major lyrics — “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Wood-Pile” — play among the twelve dramatic narratives that portray Frost’s vanishing New England. By focusing on a classic seasonal activity of rural New England life, even naming or alluding to it in its title, each of these lyric poems commemorates a signature task of this vanishing culture. Equally important, by placing these lyrics at the beginning, middle and end of the book’s elegiac arc, Frost arranges them to measure, in their progression from spring to winter, the movement toward disappearance witnessed by the book as a whole.

To appreciate this feature of Frost’s design, it is worth looking at the total arrangement of poems in the volume, including the distinction between the three major lyrics, all in blank verse or something very like it, and the two short lyrics in tetrameter quatrains, “The Pasture” and “Good Hours,” which serve as prologue and epilogue. These shorter lyrics were not listed in the book’s table of contents and were further distinguished from the principal poems by being set in italics, as they are in the list below. I have also put the major lyrics in bold print to emphasize their strategic placement.