Both “Mending Wall” and “The Wood-Pile,” the first and last of the book’s principal poems, present speakers who are “inside outsiders” in their rural world and whose mix of connection and detachment provide clear parallels to the poet who needed both involvement in and distance from the rural culture that inspired his verse. This dynamic of division, written into so much of the book, reaches even to “The Pasture” and “Good Hours,” the shorter lyrics used as prologue and epilogue to the New York edition — though “Good Hours,” in closing the volume, expresses this division more fully and openly than does “The Pasture” in its introductory role.

I have mentioned that North of Boston’s arrangement of lyric and dramatic poems, in which the poet dissolves into his dramatis personae, then reemerges from them, provides an analogue for Frost’s own decade in Derry — for the people and culture with which he involved himself yet also kept apart and finally broke away from. Within this analogous arc, “The Pasture” and “Good Hours,” taken together, reflect the changes in Frost wrought by these ten years. At his entrance to the book, as if to the decade, the relative brevity and simplicity of “The Pasture” fits the aspiring poet who approached Derry mainly as a refuge “from the world that seemed … to ‘disallow’” him (SL, 159). At the end of the book and decade, “Good Hours,” with its uneasy turnings, reflects the poet who looks back on a world from which he has kept his means of “extrication” (CPPP, 368) only to find that he has not left it wholly behind and cannot ignore the claims it has made upon him.

Like the poet who completed North of Boston far from its New England setting, these two poems stand just outside the volume proper. This degree of separation is partly a matter of visible form. Unlike the major lyrics, each of which runs from forty to forty-five lines of blank verse (or, in the case of “After Apple-Picking,” something very like blank verse), these framing poems are in rhymed tetrameter quatrains — two and four of them respectively. Unlike the principal poems, these two lyrics were originally printed in italics and did not appear in the book’s table of contents.