♪♪ ♪♪ At the end of March in 1915, Robert Frost was out walking on the outskirts of Franconia, New Hampshire, looking for a house to purchase.

Not long before Frost, had returned from England, where he had stayed for more than two years, becoming deeply homesick for the state he had left behind.

I never knew how much of a Yankee I was until I'd been out of New Hampshire, he wrote.

I suppose life in such towns as Plymouth and Derry is the best life on earth.

Now Robert Frost was determined to settle in New Hampshire once again, this time in the region of the White Mountains.

♪♪ About a mile outside of the village of Franconia.

He found what he took to be a splendid property.

It had a view of the Franconia Range of the White Mountains, dominated by Mount Lafayette.

The only problem that Robert Frost could find with the house was that somebody already lived there.

As he stood admiring the farm.

He discovered a man named Willis Herbert cleaning up the yard after the long winter.

His daughter Lesley remembers the scene in a 1977 letter, a vivid memory still after 62 years.

Well, I remember the day my father and I walked up a hill road out of Franconia and came on the Willis Herbert farm, facing one of those spectacular mountain views that the White Mountains provide.

This time the Lafayette Range.

And my father said, this is it.

He walked across the lawn to a man digging the spring earth and went straight to the point.

You wouldn't want to sell me this place, would you?

Well, after several more meetings and arrangements, we owned it.

We shingled.

Painted.

Built a shed at the back, a porch at the front, and settled down to keeping watch of many moons rising and falling over Lafayette.

The purchase price was $1,000.

By early June, Frost, his wife Eleanor, and the four children had moved in.

As it turned out, Robert Frost could hardly have found a better place than the Franconia farm to lay claim to the territory of northern New England.

In the five years he lived there, he threw himself into farming and into verse as well, irrevocably entering the roles of Yankee and Yankee poet.

He started each day in the barn, milking the two cows he had bought from Willis Herbert, and though he had been a clumsy milker before, he was now able to boast in a letter.

You will be glad to hear that my cows and I have composed our differences, and I now milk them, anchor that one end only in the summer months, the poet and his children planted and cared for a large vegetable garden, and in their first Franconia spring, assisted by their new neighbor Willis Herbert.

The family tapped the large maple trees on the property, collecting pails of sap to be boiled down into sugar or syrup.

In his poem, Evening in a Sugar Orchard, Robert Frost recalls a night at Franconia spent boiling sap with the poet Raymond Holden.

Occasionally, the two of them would take turns going outside of the sugar house to get more wood for the fire.

It's Frost’s turn to go outside for wood in Evening in a Sugar Orchard, which recounts the beauty he discovered on the way.

♪♪ From where I lingered in a lull In March Outside the sugar house One night for choice.

I called the fireman with a careful voice, and bade him leave the pan and stoke the arch Oh fireman!

give the fire another stoke, and send more sparks up chimney with the smoke.

I thought a few might tangle as they did among bare maple boughs, and in the rare hill atmosphere not cease to glow, and so he added to the moon up there.

The moon, so slight was moon enough to show on every tree a bucket with a lid, and on black ground a bearskin rug of snow.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.

They were content to figure in the trees as Leo, Orion and the Pleiades.

And that was what the boughs were full of, soon.

♪♪ During the years he lived in Derry, New Hampshire, Robert Frost became interested in the names and habitats of plants and trees in northern New England at his new property.

He investigated the woods and meadows in the spring, and brooks as well, finding a variety of wildflowers, trees and shrubs.

Then he and his children transplanted some of the species they found to the Franconia Home.

One of the poet's best known lyrics, Nothing Gold Can Stay, dating from the Franconia period, evidences Frost's awareness of northern New England botany.

Nothing Gold Can Stay also shows that Frost was attempting a new sort of poem in Franconia, one that was short, highly compressed.

Only one stanza long.

In its final version, the lyric speaks volumes about the transience of seasons and the limits of human life.

[Birds singing] Nature's first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold her early leaf’s a flower but only sol an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost found that the weather did not always favor his attempts to raise vegetables in Franconia.

He learned to study the sky over Mount Lafayette early each morning, to see whether the day would bring sun or rain.

During the late summer, he began to look for a downward flow of cold air off of the mountains, which might carry a dreaded frost.

One summer, his fourth in Franconia, he was surprised to discover signs of a hard frost in the middle of June.

Our thermometer dropped at 25 night before last and 30 last night, losing us all, our seed and a month's growth, he wrote to a friend.

The small farmers wrapped their gardens up in their own clothes and bedclothes.

A lot of good it did.

My favorite tomato froze right in my heavy overcoat.

From such New Hampshire experiences, Frost gained a special understanding about the dark side of nature in northern New England, an understanding which he revealed in his Franconia poem, The Need of Being Versed in Country Things.

In the poem, fire and the harsh wind combined together to burn a farmhouse down to the ground, leaving only the chimney standing.

The only thing that prevents the nearby barn from burning down, too, is nature's whimsy.

What Frost calls the will of the wind.

[Birds singing] Do the phoebes that fly in and out of the barn's broken windows express in their cry, the sadness nature feels for such loss?

Anyone versed in country things, Frost tells us, would disbelieve the phoebes wept.

♪♪ The house had gone to bring again, To the midnight sky a sunset glow.

Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in.

Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much, dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them lilac renewed its leaf.

And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm; and the fencepost carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things, not to believe the phoebes wept.

♪♪ While Robert Frost lived in Franconia, he wrote some of his best poems and made some of his most compelling statements about poetry.

In a letter to his friend Louis Untermeyer, he declared, a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a homesickness, a love sickness.

Later, he told an interviewer about the value to poetry of everyday spoken language, as a picture gives its message to the eye.

So the conversational tones of words have their special message for the ear.

The importance of a conversational language was one of Frost's favorite themes, both before and during his Franconia years.

In one of his letters on the subject, he included a poem which would later appear in his Franconia volume, A Mountain Interval, published in 1916, titled A Patch of Old Snow.

It was one of Frost's briefest, only two sentences long.

[Birds singing] There's a patch of old snow in a corner that I should have guessed was a blown away paper, the rain had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime, as if a small print overspread it.

The news of the day, I've forgotten if I ever read it.

The first sentence is merely ordinary and bookish, Frost wrote.

But the effectiveness of the second sentence is in the very special tone with which you must say it.

In that second sentence, there is a special tone with which you must say news of the day.

If I ever read it, you must be able to say, oh yes, one knows how that goes.

Notice also he said, there are in the poem certain points of recognition.

Patch of old snow.

You know what that is?

You know what a blow away newspaper is?

It's never the job of the poet to tell people something they don't know, but something they know and hadn't thought of saying.

It must be something they recognize.

The more Robert Frost himself came to know and recognize about the rural life of New Hampshire, the more impatient he became with what he called guidebook poets whose knowledge of nature was superficial.

Instead of dealing with the facts themselves, Frost declared in a Franconia interview, such poets brought pockets full of poetic adjectives, like pockets full of peanuts carried into the park for the gray squirrels.

Some years later, Robert Frost wrote a little known but beautiful lyric titled The Freedom of the Moon.

In that poem, he took advice he gave poets in his interview on how to describe the moon.

Don't lay on the emotions, he said.

When writing about the moon, set yourself against it.

If the moon's going to do anything to you, it's up to the moon.

♪♪ I've tried the new moon.

Tilted in the air.

Above a hazy tree and farmhouse cluster.

As you might try a jewel in your hair.

I've tried it fine.

With a little breadth of luster alone, or in one ornament combining with one first water star, almost as shining.

♪♪ I put it shining anywhere I please by walking slowly on some evening later I’ve pulled it from a crate of crooked trees and brought it over glossy water.

Greater, and dropped it in and seen the image wallow, the color, run all sorts of wonder follow.

As Robert Frost’s fame grew, the requests for readings of poetry by and interviews with the Yankee poet from New Hampshire increased what was life at his Franconia farm like?

Interviewers often wanted to know.

After a reading in Philadelphia in 1916, the poet responded this way: My country is a milk and sugar country.

We get what runs from the trees and what runs from the cows.

You can't do much real farming since we have frost every month of the year.

You know, the White Mountain farmers say they have nine months of winter and three months of late in the fall.

Though Robert Frost left his farm in Franconia in 1920, five years after he moved there.

He never forgot the place he called his country of milk and sugar.

When the poet was 75 years old, he referred to it with affection as my one horse New England farm, where I used to do everything, including the milking.

And in his fourth volume of verse, titled New Hampshire, published in 1923.

Frost recalled the Franconia area in several poems.

One was that moonstruck lyric, The Freedom of the Moon.

Another was a more somber verse.

The Census Taker.

The poem describes the destruction left by a logging operation in a place of the sort Frost must have seen on one of his long walks in the North Country.

The man describing the destruction in the poem is a census taker, counting all by himself in the twilight of this world of waste.

Frost’s narrator suggests the decay, lost hopes and loneliness, Robert Frost sometimes found in the region north of Boston.

[Wind blows faintly] I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening To a slab-built black-paper -covered house of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over a hundred square miles round it in the mountains.

And that not dwelled in now by men or women, never had been dwelt in, though by women.

So what is this I make sorrow of?

[Crickets chirping] I came as census taker to the waste to count the people in it, and found none.

None in the hundred miles.

None in the house where I came last with some hope, but not much.

After hours overlooking from the cliffs and emptiness flayed to the very stone, I found no people that dared show themselves.

None not in hiding from the outward eye.

The time was autumn.

But how anyone could tell the time of year when every tree that could have dropped a leaf was down itself.

And nothing but the stump of it was left now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch.

In every tree, up stood a rotting trunk without a single leaf to spend on autumn, or branch to whistle after what was spent.

Perhaps the wind, the more without the help of breathing trees.

Said something of the time of year or day.

The way it swung a door forever off the latch, as if rude men passed in and slammed it shut, each one behind him, for the next one to open for himself, I counted nine.

I had no right to count, but this was dreamy, unofficial counting before I made the tenth across the threshold.

Where was my supper?

Where was anyone's?

No lamp was lit.

Nothing was on the table.

The stove was cold.

Stove was off the chimney, and down by one side where it lacked a leg.

The people that had loudly passed the door were people to the ear, but not the eye.

They were not on the table with their elbows.

They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.

I saw no men there and no bones of men there.

I armed myself against such bones as might be, with the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle I picked up off the straw dust covered floor not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.

The door was still because I held it shut when I thought of what to do that could be done about the house, about the people not there.

This house, in one year fallen into decay, filled me with no less sorrow than the houses fallen to ruin in ten thousand years.

Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.

Nothing was left to do that I could see.

Unless to find that there was no one there.

And declare to the cliffs too far for echo.

The place is desert.

And let whoso lurks in silence If in this he is aggrieved, Break silence now, or be forever silent.

Let him say why it should not be declared so.

The melancholy of having to count souls where they grow fewer and fewer every year is extreme.

Where they shrink to none at all.

It must be I want life to go on living [Wind howls] ♪♪ During a two year stay in England, where Robert Frost wrote his first two books of verse, he wrote to a friend of the return he planned to New Hampshire.

I shall get me a farm, he said, where between milking one cow and another I shall write books three, four and five.

The farm Frost ultimately got was located, of course, in Franconia, while the poet did not remain there to write books three and four, he did finish the poems of his third book there, and still other poems that finally appeared in later books.

Some of those poems were short and highly compressed, others contain the lively tones of conversation and almost all dealt with the people, places, or nature of northern New England life.

Life that Frost, like his census taker, hoped would go on living.

Starting out in Derry and carrying on his Franconia farm among the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Robert Frost wrote poems that were both local and universal, and through them fixed his own high place in poetry.

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