Magnolia

The Ache of Memory: Visiting the Robert Frost Farm

Although it was late July, the weather behaved like November, painting the low stratus sky lead-gray and pelting the earth with long heavy rains throughout the day and night.  I stayed just down the road at the family-run Robert Frost Inn, close enough to return a half dozen times to the old Frost farm, trying to catch the few rays of light that shone through at any hour of the day.  Cursing the rain, I shot the photographs anyway, imagining the entire shoot a waste of time. 

Through the lens, I saw the farm, the fields, the gables of barn and house mingled in fog and New England want of color, a dolor no doubt more familiar to Frost and New Englanders than the sun. 

The farmhouse itself is a simple house with a large barn attached at the rear, a gothic board and batten white farmhouse with miniature rooms and dark halls. As I stood in the living room where a pair of chairs had been carefully placed by the windows around a table with an open dictionary, I realized that Mr. Frost must have been physically smaller than the enormous figure that looms in America literature. According to the State of New Hampshire forest service employee who served as tour guide inside the house, it was Frost’s daughter Leslie who supervised the furniture arrangement, claiming her father loved that very spot where he could study the words of the English language he so loved in fine natural light.

The barn, in Yankee fashion attached to house for winter convenience, towers above the house, and from the rear—a view we know the poet took in almost daily, as he himself says in his journals—the sturdy three gables of house and barn sit steady and solemn on the land. It is a spot that inspires a sense of peace, while the house—demure enough seen from the road with its narrow width and white picket fence—sprawls out lovely and long when viewed from the north side and even powerful as it rises in view from the rear fields. 

It is a house just far enough from town that any visitor might find it charming in daylight but eerie at night.  From the upstairs windows looking out, for example, a visitor might feel the despair of Frost’s “hill wife,” or know the isolation and night quiet of Mary and her farmer husband in “The Death of the Hired Man.”  In the famous poem, the farm couple sit “on the wooden steps” of the porch and discuss old Silas, who has come home to die. The farm couple’s tender argument and ultimate definition of what home is has become familiar to all of us: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”  

The gardens and fields about the farm clearly inspired many poems, such as “Rose Pegonias” and “Hyla Brook”, among others.  Visitors to the farm can walk the rear fields to the stream that inspired Frost on daily basis.   Two of the poet’s most well known poems were unarguably the product of Frost’s life at the Derry farm—“After Apple Picking” and “Mending Wall.”

Many reliable sources such as the brochure distributed by the State of New Hampshire state that the poet once a year walked the property line between his own and his neighbor’s property, setting aright again any stones fallen or broken off from the bordering stone wall.  The neighbor’s name was Napoleon Guay, and Frost apparently enjoyed his company yet recognized certain simplicity in Guay’s reasoning that kept the neighbor from thinking beyond what he has heard from his father. 
 

Mending Wall, Frost Farm
                                               

“And on a day we meet to walk the line
              And set the wall between us once again…
              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.”

(from “Mending Wall,” 1914, by Robert Frost)

All that remains of Frost’s cherished apple orchard is a lone tree here and there in the north field behind the barn, but one can imagine the young husband, teacher and poet perched on a ladder “pointing towards heaven still”, reaching for another harvest apple. This poem—melancholy as it is—grants us a peek into the young writer’s mind. The speaker in the poem claims to be “weary of that same harvest that I myself desired.”  Somehow this particular remaining apple tree seems a fey spot. 
 
 After Apple Picking,, Frost Farm

Ultimately, Frost tired of teaching and struggling to make ends meet, so he sold the farm in 1912 and went to England on a self-imposed exile from America. Years later, by then a poet of repute, he returned to find the old farm in disrepair and used as a tire dump.  Later, he wrote these lines in “On the Sale of My Farm” about that visit:

            “Only be it understood,
            It shall be no trespassing
            If I come again some spring
            In the gray disguise of years
            Seeking ache of memory here.”
 
The word “ache” appears in both “Apple After Picking,” offering readers a view into the kind of homesickness we have all felt at one time or another that Frost clearly understood.

I’m nostalgic about place, it’s true.  As I watched and listened to other visitors in the four days I spent there, I noticed that the Frost farm evokes whispers from most visitors. The house, barn, and fields beyond have a quietude and a sense of peace that, having left it for other states, stays in the mind.  It reminds us of our own special places, wherever they are. Maybe we all feel the ache of memory here of those houses we lived in and left.

“After Apple Picking, Robert Frost Farm, Derry NH” published as the cover photograph of Suzanne Keyworth’s Markers published by MayApple Press, 2005.

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