By X. J. Kennedy, 1996
. . .Eighty-six when I first saw him, Frost looked his age. His stocky form moved ponderously. He seldom smiled, but, in front of an audience, his craggy face would occasionally break out with a flash of spirit. As a reader-aloud of his work, Frost was like no other I had heard before. Sometimes he would say a poem twice, making sure we had taken it in, spending less time in reading than in rambling talk. In all, he would deliver no more than six or seven poems. The ones he chose impressed me deeply. Probably they were all poems he knew by heart, for according to Ciardi he was too vain to wear his reading glasses in public. . .
. . . Frost recited the well-known "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and told how he had written it. He had been working all night on a different poem, having a hard time with it. Then just before dawn, sleepless and tired, had found himself writing this one. Not knowing how to end it and needing one more line, he had wearily repeated "And miles to go before I sleep"—and decided to hang on to that repetition after all. . .
His poems have often been misinterpreted. "The Road Not Taken," he claimed, was a war poem. "I wrote it in 1914, 1915, in Europe. Sent it to a friend at the front who 'might be telling this with a sigh.' I wonder if I should tell that. If I didn't, you might think it was about me." (That Frost had indeed meant himself was how his friend Edward Thomas had misunderstood the poem. Frost may have been suppressing a painful memory. According to Lawrence Thompson, Frost had written "The Road Not Taken" to chide Thomas on his habitual indecision. It was ironic that Frost had sent it to Thomas at that moment. Still at home in England in 1915 when he received it, Thomas had made up his mind to enlist. The decision cost him his life. At 39, he would be killed by a German shell in 1917.). . .
I was to hear Frost myself one last time, on the second of April, 1962, when he faced an overflow crowd in the University of Michigan's sold-out 4,OOO-seat Hill Auditorium. Early in his career, Frost had known rewarding days at Michigan, teaching a course so informal that it had met in his living room, when it met at all. He had also known lonely days—and nights. Local legend had it that his poem "Acquainted with the Night" had been written in Ann Arbor, and that its "luminary clock against the sky" was the clock in the Burton Tower, a campus landmark. [Editor's note: This identification remains a popular legend in Ann Arbor. Unfortunately, the facts will not cooperate. "Acquainted with the Night" appeared in Frost's volume of 1928, West-Running Brook, and Burton Tower was not erected until 1935. Frost surely refers to the Big Ben tower of the Houses of Parliament in London. ] According to Mary Cooley, longtime curator of the Hopwood Room, who as an undergraduate had been Frost's student, the poet had been given to long, aimless midnight walks. On one of these rambles he had been stopped and questioned by the police as a suspicious character.
That night I was again just a member of his audience. Donald Hall introduced him, to tremendous applause. A surprising change had come over Frost. The 88-year-old poet seemed charged with energy, perhaps due to, among other things, the appearance of his last collection, In the Clearing, published the month before, which had scored a rare success for a book of poetry: it had hit the bestseller list. . . He read with more zest than he had shown at Bread Loaf, and seemed hugely to enjoy himself—still talking much, reading little poetry.
He gave us two encores, and finally snapped shut his reading with the sonnet "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," about Eve in Eden, ending with a wonderful configuration of one-syllable words—
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.
—snapped it shut like a triumphant pitcher fanning a better in the bottom of the ninth inning. Because of the size of the audience, there were no questions, so that his deafness caused him no problem. After that night, he would live less than a year.