I don’t mind being made controversial. No sweeter music can come to my ears than the clash of arms over my dead body when I am down.
—Robert Frost to Lionel Trilling, June 18, 1959

It was Frost’s custom to prefix to successive issues of his collected poems “The Pasture,” an invitation—originally published in North of Boston—into his pastoral world of bucolic delights:

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 sha’n’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 sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

This charming and seductive little poem I have always felt to be misleading. It promises something very interesting to see, without any labor; it guarantees a diversion, but one not overlong in its attraction; and it offers us the companionship, even the protective beneficence, of a kindly speaker who seems to know both what his work is and what our limits are in watching him do it. It is on the basis of poems like this—and there are a great many of them—that Frost attained the reputation of being a genial farmer-poet. Most readers of poetry in his time did not tire of watching Frost at his upcountry work. For remarkable poems came to record