The poetry published between Frost's fiftieth and sixtieth years grew in serenity and intimacy. The lyrics became warmer and more musical, the communication more expansive. The poet still maintained his rôle of half-earnest synecdochist. He reaffirmed his conviction: "All that an artist needs is samples." This employment of the part for the whole sharpens the ruminating accents of "Tree at My Window," fastens the epigrammatic irony of "The Peaceful Shepherd," quickens the somber power of "Bereft" and "Once by the Pacific," points the teasing play of "The Bear."

A Further Range (1936) reveals the renewed play of the serious mind. It is emphasized by the self-disclosing "A Leaf-Treader" and "Desert Places" and "Two Tramps in Mud-Time," the last being one of the most persuasive poems of the period. In the later poems Frost is more than ever a "revisionist"; he uses his power to revise stereotypes of thought as well as clichés of expression. If it were not for the journalistic connotations one might add the term "humorist" to the roll-call of “classicist,” “realist," and "revisionist." His style, so seemingly casual and yet so inimitable, so colloquial and so elevated, has a way of uniting opposites. It is a remarkable prestidigitation in which fact becomes fantasy, and the fancy is more convincing than the fact. Inner seriousness and outer humor continually shift their centers of gravity—and levity—until it must be plain to all but pedants that Frost's banter is as full of serious implications as his somber speculations, that his playfulness is even more profound than his profundity.

A new and comprehensive Collected Poems (1939) reveals the greater scope and increasing depth of the poet's gift. Published in Frost's sixty-fifth year, much of the poetry seems younger than ever. Retaining the tart accent of his forefathers, and sometimes recording what might be called New England's heritage of chronic adversity, Frost sounds a new tenderness and humor. From the early burlesque of "Brown's Descent" through the ironic "The Egg and the Machine" to the outright jocularity of "Departmental" there is a pungence which is also poignant. Here is disclosed the poetry of one who, like Wordsworth, knows Nature intimately, but one who, unlike the poet to whom Frost has been compared, refuses to sentimentalize "the spirit that impels all things." It is the expression of a man who has lived among men of many kinds, who has understood and even sympathized with the conventions, but who has never been deceived by them.

To the 1939 Collected Poems Frost furnished a preface entitled "The Figure a Poem Makes," a piece of prose as characteristic as his poetry. In it he wrote: “A pocm begins in delight and ends in wisdom. It has an outcome that, though unforeseen, was predestined from the first image of the mood. . . . No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew."

It is not hard to discover the reason for Frost's popularity among those who create poetry as well as those who do not often turn to it. Readers are grateful to such a poet because they have been charmed and, at the same time, intellectually challenged. They are happy not only because they have learned something new but because they have experienced something old-the initial delight of "remembering something" they didn't know they knew.

THE PASTURE

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young.
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long.-You come too.

THE ONSET

Always the same when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It shall not make again all winter long-
Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground-
I almost stumble looking up and round,
As one, who, overtaken by the end,
Gives up his errand and lets death descend
Upon him where he is, with nothing done
To evil, no important triumph won
More than if life had never been begun.

Yet all the precedent is on my side:

I know that winter-death has never tried
The earth but it has failed; the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch or oak;
It cannot check the Peeper's silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill

That flashes tail through last year's withered brake
And dead weed like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch
And there a clump of houses with a church.

THE TUFT OF FLOWERS

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,-alone,

And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly-weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech. With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

"Men work together," I told him from the heart, "Whether they work together or apart."

RELUCTANCE

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one

And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,

When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;

The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper bowlders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the bowlders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down!" I could say "elves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness, as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

THE COW IN APPLE-TIME

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider sirup. Having tasted fruit,

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

THE DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN

Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. "Silas is back."
She pushed him outward with her through the door
And shut it after her. "Be kind," she said.