A Boy's Will

by Robert Frost, 1st World Publishing (Editor)

ONE of my wishes is that those dark trees, So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom, But stretched away unto the edge of doom. I should not be withheld but that some day Into their vastness I should steal away, Fearless of ever finding open land, Or highway where the slow wheel ours the sand. I do not see why I should e'er turn back, Or those should not set forth upon my track To overtake me, who should miss me here And long to know if still I held them dear. They would not find me changed from him they knew-Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, 20th Century, American, Audiobook, Ebooks

108 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is often unfair to judge a poet by his first book, and this is certainly true of Robert Frost's A Boy's Will (1913). The title, taken from a once-familiar refrain of Longfellow's (“A boy's will is the wind's will/ And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts"), suggests that Frost was conscious of the fact that this little collection—although first published in England when he was thirty-nine—contained more than a few works of a youthful, inexperienced writer.

Indeed, two of the more overtly philosophical pieces—“The Trial by Existence" and “In Equal Sacrifice,” which Frost buries near the middle of the book—are poor imitations of Victorian verse and sound as if Frost may have written them in his teens. Most of the rest of the poems are good, but not better than a typical Edward Arlington Robinson poem. In fact, there is only one Frost "classic" in the book: “A Tuft of Flowers,” in which the poet reflects upon a bunch of blooms beside a stream that has been spared in a recent mowing. (The well-known works start with his next book, North of Boston (1914), published two years later: “Mending Wall,” “The Death of a Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “After Apple Picking.”)

Nevertheless, in many of these early poems, you can discern the characteristic Frost ambiguity and the distinctive Frost voice. What I mean by the characteristic Frost ambiguity: even the most common observation is often qualified by a clause, undermined by an image, or modified by a dramatic situation so that the result is something much more complex than it may first appear. Take the first poem in this book, for example, the sonnet “Into My Own”:

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew–
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Each piece in the book is introduced by an explanatory phrase, and “Into My Own” is described as a poem in which “the youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world.” Notice that "the youth" is not confident but "is persuaded" and notice the smallness of the claim to become “rather more than less himself.”

Such qualifications appear throughout the poem. The youth tells us that this is not only just a "wish," but merely “one of” his wishes, and admits that the trees themselves are “the merest mask of gloom,” “as t'were,” for, although dark and old, they presumably don't stretch far enough to make a real honest-to-goodness wood. But if this were a real wood—which it is not--the poet asserts that “I should not be witheld but that some day...I should steal away.” Again, a series of interesting qualifications. He seems to imply that he might be held back from going, and that, although at first he may very well give in to this restraint, he will nevertheless manage to “someday” sneak away. But do we really believe he will go, and--if he does--what assurance do we have that he won't eventually come back? He only claims that he does “not see why” he should, and also does not see why other people who may miss him and wish to know if he still loves him, should not follow his path and track him down instead. He says if they did, they would not find him changed—finally an assertion (almost) without qualification!—but only find that he was by this time more sure of everything he believed and thought (and loved?) than he was before.

But how sure is he now? Our poem is filled with a crowd of small doubts, and this final assurance is not really much of an assurance. He is not, after all, foreswearing the world, but merely using a small break of trees to help him imagine what it would be like if he had a big wild dark dramatic wood to hide in, and he remains uncertain of almost everything—except for the fact that on his imaginary journey, he will not change one a bit.

Yes, the characteristic Frost ambiguity—that will soon make superficially simple works such as “Mending Wall” an inexhaustible font of rich interpretations—is here, in the first poem of Frost's first book.

I will conclude with a couple of fine lyrics, one about the dead of winter, and one about the thaw that heralds the spring.

Storm Fear

When the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lowest chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
'Come out! Come out!'-
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,-
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether 'tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.


To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

  

  My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
 Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
 She walks the sodden pasture lane.

first lines of My November Guest




Frost, ca. 1910


This was Robert Frost's first published collection. In 1913 he and his family were living in the U.K., where the slim volume was first published.

Frost was almost forty years old in 1913. I found it curious that a middle-aged man would give this title to his first collection of poetry. And it really is "about" a young man, or a "youth" in this gloss that Frost wrote for the first poem, "Into My Own":

The youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world.

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land.
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew –
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Presumably many of these poems went back several years, to a time when the poet really was a younger man.


my discovery

I was somewhat hesitant to embark on this long, complete collection of the eleven volumes that Frost published in his long life - from this one, to In the Clearing, published almost fifty years later. After reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, and Arthur Rimbaud I was prepared for something completely different, something much tamer, something perhaps even boring by comparison. But I found the resolve for at least the attempt, recalling a recent review of Frost by my GR friend Dolors.

Tame? Well perhaps tamer, yes. But boring? My god, no. As I read through these poems, I was frankly shocked by what I (ignorantly, perhaps) viewed as their "modernist" style and voice. The thought occurred that they could have been styled after Virginia Woolf – except Woolf was not known for poetry, and Frost's writing would likely have come first anyway.

Here's a poem that reminded me, a bit, of the modernist Wallace Stevens. (But Stevens seldom, if ever, intrudes into his poems with an "I".)

MOWING

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound –
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fey or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows –
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

But aside from the voice, and the style, there is…


… the lilt

In several of the poems, there is what seemed to me an Irish, or Scottish, lilt to the rhythm of the lines.

The rest of the review will be poetic. Thankfully not by me, but by Frost, and a couple others.


I. My Heart's in the Highlands *

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

II. Love and a Question **

A Stranger came to the door at eve,
 And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
 And, for all burden, care.
He asked with the eyes more than the lips
 For a shelter for the night,
And he turned and looked at the road afar
 Without a window light.

The bridegroom came forth into the porch
 With, "Let us look at the sky,
And question what of the night to be,
 Stranger, you and I."
The woodbine leaves littered the yard,
 The woodbine berries were blue,
Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;
 "Stranger, I wish I knew."

Within, the bride in the dusk alone
 Bent over the open fire,
Her face rose-red with the glowing coal
 And the thought of the heart's desire.
The bridegroom looked at the weary road,
 Yet saw but her within,
And wished her heart in a case of gold
 And pinned with a silver pin.

The bridegroom thought it little to give
 A dole of bread, a purse,
A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,
 Or for the rich a curse;
But whether or not a man was asked
 To mar the love of two
By harboring woe in the bridal house,
 The bridegroom wished he knew.

III. The Border Loving ***

The wan water runs fast between us,
It runs between my love and me,
Since the fairy woman has made him a fairy
And sat her down upon his knee.

Eden Water flows cold between us
And west of Eden the Solway tide,
But the fairy woman she came from Ireland
And my love stayed on the further side;
My love lies snug in Carlisle Castle
With the changeling woman for year-long bride.

Waters of Tweed are deep between us,
Fierce and steep the unridden fells;
But the fairy woman watches the swallows
And tastes the clover and hears the bells,
And my love watches and hears and follows.

IV. A Line-Storm Song **

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift.
 The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz-stones lift,
 And the hoofprints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
 Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
 And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
 In the wood-world's torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
 Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
 Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods, come,
 Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
 And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
 From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
 And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch, shall wet your breast
 The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
 But it seems like the sea's return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
 Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when, after doubt,
 Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
 And be my love in the rain.

V. Mairi Maclean and the Fairy Man (last part) ***

Oh maybe ‘tis my rock
And maybe ‘tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.

Oh maybe ‘tis the meal ark
That stands beside the wall,
And maybe ‘tis the weaving,
And I’ll being seeing to all.

And maybe ‘tis the pot,
And maybe ‘tis the pan.
But I can write songs as good
As the songs of the fairy man!

VI. 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 whither;
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?

* Robert Burns
** Robert Frost
*** Naomi Mitchison (contained in The Fourth Pig)



. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe
Next review: Tom Paine A Political Life
Older review: Almost No Memory (some of) the short fiction of Lydia Davis

Previous library review: The Poetry of Robert Frost
Next library review: North of Boston

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've decided to go back to the beginning of Robert Frost's poetry and read it all. I've only ever done that with one other poet (not naming names), and it was a wonderful experience; it feels like a relationship with someone who was writing to share themselves with only you.

A Boy's Will is the beginning of my journey with Frost. I've loved the poems I've read in the past, and I've read more than a few (more than are found in the usual anthologies), but this is something different, reading everything produced with only Frost to curate his work.

This collection is mostly made up of the two surface themes Frost was most obsessed with: nature and the supernatural (though I don't think Frost was actually a "nature poet," more on that when I get to North of Boston, I think). He's weakest when he's focused on the supernatural. There is a brooding melancholy that feels too self-indulgent (I say "too" because I firmly believe that poetry is necessarily the most "self-indulgent" of literatures); it's a self-indulgence that distracts from the narrative flow of Frost's supernatural verses, holding the reader (or this reader, at least) from fully embracing the experience.

But then Frost writes about something simple like "Mowing," and suddenly he invites the reader to join him "beside the wood" where he evokes the senses, summoning us to his experience like the great conjurer he is. It is this, his ability to make me feel what he felt, that has led me to reading everything he has ever published. What he does, what he did, is beautiful.

I am going for walk in the snow today. I want to feel it like he did.

[Dorotea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Evocative poetry that reminds me of home, longing for solitude, running away from the chaotic masses, majestic nature, suicidal thoughts, aching for a place where you belong, an inward struggle.

My favourite poems of the collection are: Going for Water, Reluctance, Storm Fear and Into My Own

[Kathy Dou · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short collection of Robert Frost was his first published book. Typical of Frost's style, the poetry in it are plain-worded, rhythmical and well-orgnized. Reading through the three sections is like going through the three stages of life: from a careless, ambitious boy,to a young man saturated with love, then subtlly slide into the last stage of life, hanging on the little time left for him on earth.
The lines, in addition to the well-sorted structure, are surreal. They lead me to a state of verdant meadows and crimson flowers where love adds to the sweetness of the summer air, or the winter chill. Such sentences as "the ages of a day" would remain in my mind for long.
Nevertheless, there's little, if nothing at all, didactic in it. But is that not what poetry should be? A mere offering for the pleasure of mind.

[madie (madieanne) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 out of five stars.

i rounded the star rating up solely because of ‘my november guest’. i have that poem memorized by heart.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is just filled with some of the most astounding nature imagery I've read in poetry, but there are just a few too many duds. Poems like "The Vantage Point" and "Storm Fears" are wonderful in language and theme, relating passionate natural scenery to modern life. But the longer poems ("The Trial by Existence" for one) are horribly over philosophical and just oddly written. It's a collection that is worth reading, but it might be good to pick and choose which ones to really analyze deeply.

[Michael Bafford · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was surprisingly good. Considering that Frost was using rhyme and meter that were more... appropriate to - or at least more popular in - the century prior to his writing here. But unashamed -and unabashed - he finds themes that are new; images, scenery, tales to tell. And at times obfustication on a fine scale.
Frost's later voice is heard at times, but these songs of youth have their own merit. Recommended to all who love the Romantics

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to Robert Bethune narrate the Audible version, but also referred to my Frost collection to review specific poems and lines. Beautifully done, with a keen sense of timing and relationship to the pastoral setting in Frost's work, and also the themes of recurring seasons, death, and rebirth. Those themes were the elements that I picked up on over and over again while listening. My family had the opportunity to visit the Robert Frost Farm two summers ago, and it was easy to visualize the gardens, pastures, Hyla Brook, and the woods near the property as I listened to this, his first published book of poetry. An early but important work that shows his promise as a poet and the directions he would follow in his subsequent body of work.

[Phillip Marsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favourites:

• Into My Own
• My November Guest
• Flower Gathering
• The Trial by Existence
• Now Close the Windows
• in Hardwood Groves

[Harshita Vyas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lovers forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze….

[Cheryl]

written about the same time as Wind in the Willows, this also includes a reference to the god Pan

[Bridget S. · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little too Robert Frosty for me

[A.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

The onset of unseasonably spring-like weather provided an ideal ambiance for reading Robert Frost's A Boy's Will, a book of poetry that - in spite of being Frost's first published collection and feeling a bit amateur given the excellence of his later works - is still brimming with his passion for nature.

After a few reads, it seems to me the book follows the seasons, beginning and ending in the fall. The poet has an intimate relationship with his natural surroundings - the trees and the woods and the creatures who dwell there not only the objects of his writing but also acting as mirrors into his soul and sounding boards for his insights.

There are a number of lovely poems, including "My November Guest," a personification of the poet's own sorrow, who "thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful as days can be; She loves the bare, the withered tree . . . The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees, She thinks I have no eye for these . . ."

"A Prayer in Spring," is a spiritual call for all of us to live in the moment:

"OH, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year."

I enjoyed his contemplation of the human desire for both the company of others and the solitude of nature - and how they do not have to conflict but simply be seen as a different "Vantage Point" in his poem of the same name:

"IF tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me-in the dawn . . .
And if by moon I have too much of these,
I have but to turn on my arm, and lo,
The sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow, . . .
I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant,
I look into the crater of the ant."

And "Going for Water" reminds me of a Zen koan:

"THE well was dry beside the door,
And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
To seek the brook if still it ran;
Not loth to have excuse to go."

In his final poem, "Reluctance," the poet reviews his journey through field and woods, his observance of the workings of the world and concludes:

"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 and accept the end
Of a love or a season?"

A Boy's Will is available as a free download for the Amazon Kindle (and other e-readers). Treat yourself.

[Amy Grondin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was Frost's first published book of poetry. Reading it is both humbling (because even at the beginning of his career, you can see his special genius at work) and inspiring (because you get to witness how even a poet of incredible talent wrote some rather ho-hum, mediocre verse to go along with the more impressive stuff). Four stars for the collection overall, although to do any sort of justice to it, I would really have to go poem by poem... 3 stars, 5 stars, 5 stars, 4 stars, 2 stars (ouch!). Some of my favorites from the collection were probably "My November Guest," "To the Thawing Wind," "Waiting -- Afield at dusk," "October," and "A Line-Storm Song."

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frost’s early cycle of poems is romantic in both verse and theme - the development of a mind.

[Catherine Hayden · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t think his poems are for me

[The_J · Rating 4 out of 5]

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind the light words that tease and flout

[Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

No Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood, but I liked:
Rose Pogonias
Asking for Roses
The Tuft of Flowers
October

[Craig Werner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've embarked on a start-to-finish reading of Frost's poetry, volume by volume. A Boy's Will was his first book and, like many (most?) first books, it's a mixed bag. There are many glimpses of Frost's mature concerns: the call and response between humanity and the natural world, the tension between his sense of spiritual meaning and his equally power sense that humanity's more or less on its existential own. Way too much archaic, slightly stilted language--he'll get over that very quickly, but I've filled my quota of "o'er"s for the year. Recommended poems: Storm Fear, A Dream Pang, Mowing (the one which is usually anthologized to represent the book, not a bad choice)and Going for Water. Anyone who's not a Frost completist would probably do better beginning with North of Boston.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

After spending over a year with more modernist poets, reading Frost was a nice return to more structured poetry - metered and rhyming. This volume is probably best known for "A Tuft of Flowers" and its beautiful depiction of human camaraderie both near and far, but I also appreciated it for some of the less known poems - the warning to introverts in "Revelation," the hopes for a fall day in "October," the change of the seasons in "Reluctance," and the impending doom of a coming storm in "Storm Fear." I also enjoyed some of the descriptions of common things like mowing a field or the wind blowing.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Frost's first collection, published when he was 39. There are hints of the Frost who would be an icon, (a heavy reliance on nature, simplicity and common folk doing common things), but the writing is still a bit amateur and relies on romantic tropes such as fairies, elves, thees and thys.

A good study on where a great poet can come from. And no one breaks out fully formed.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Early Frost---with the weakness of late 19th Century "poetic diction," There are glimmers of what great poetry that is to come. If you are studying his development, this is a good collection to see where Frost began, Otherwise, move to later collections for the good stuff.

[Gregory Rothbard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Frost is much more than a yankee deciding on which road to take. I liked this one a lot.

[Randal Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enjoyed very much

[Michael Arnold · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite Frost collections. I really love this book.

[Anna F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

---
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
---

[Delanie Dooms · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know approximately nothing about Robert Frost and poetry. Not necessarily because of this my review will be short, but it does have some effect; in addition, I failed to read the additional comments Frost gave on these poems in other additions than mine, which also hinders my understanding, if only because the intended experience has been marred slightly. (I read these in a collection of his poems, which for some-odd reason removed this addition stuff.)
Aside from that, and a comment - given now - on the ability to interpret poems against the original will of the author (as must all negative critique be and as some positive), I hereafter write about the poems alone.

I liked most of the poems in this book. Some were, to be frank, not the best, but most were good. I think my favorite has to be "My November Guest." It appreciates sorrow. I like poems or stories which allow for that to be discussed. It is often, with just reason, that such emotions are barred from being talked about positively. Indeed, one might even think it impossible - it seems oxymoronic. Positive sorrow. Yeah.
Yet, it can be had through poetry. The heart of the poem above-named is rather that of seeing the positive in sorrow - even unto the point that sorrow's praises are better than our narrators, although he is also in the know - which I think is a loveable theme.
Many of these poems have themes of nature in them. They connect with experiences and emotions, and if I hadn't known that there was additional material explaining the meanings behind these poems (in relation to, apparently, the "boy" from the title), I'd think of them as purely interpretational in nature. We can choose to see what we see the in the experience described, I mean; and to some extent this is the case, Frost is rather ambiguous at times, but to another sense he does provide some addendum.
All in all, I thought it was worth 4 stars.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The volume, ‘A Boy's Will’ symbolizes the initial efforts of Robert Frost to find his idiom. One distinguishing feature of this volume is its local colour. In almost every poem we get a glance of New England, its nature, its landscape and its inhabitants.

In the poems of this volume we find the poet's retorts to the seasonal cycle of moving through deeds and representations of winter, spring, summer and lastly returning with a difference to autumnal settings.

In these variations of positions toward nature, the young and maturing poet's moods entertain different values at different times. If at one moment nature seems to him unresponsive and blind towards man, it can also reflect a divine plan.

Frost had come to England after disposing of all his property and worldly belongings, with the specific aim of devoting himself to poetry. This was a risk, but the risk was very successful.

This book was accepted by the very first publisher to whom it was offered. In this volume that capricious humour that was to become so well-known in the later years is not yet evident.

On the other hand, the enthusiasm of the lines "To the Thawing Wind" and "A Line Storm Sang" was to disappear in the later poetry.

But Frost was convinced of his direction and he spoke with his own voice. "Mowing", "October" and "The Tuft of Flowers" are some of the significant poems of this volume.

[Dave Franklin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Frost’s short volume, “A Boy’s Will,” was his first published collection of poetry. Steeped in the English pastoral tradition, Frost's style manifests straight-forward language and traditional rhythms. The three sections take the reader on a journey through life’s stages: the callow boy, born with ambitions; the young man consumed by hopes and dreams; and finally, the man who must reflect on his legacy, and ponder the questions of deeper import.

Frost’s lines are well-crafted and reflect his deep appreciation for nature. A philosophical dualist, Frost’s poems evoke the limits of human responses to the world writ large, and the indifference of an ever changing universe to human desires. His poetry, then, can be seen as ‘a momentary stay against confusion.’ The verdant meadows and blossoming flowers described in this collection do not long endure, their presence and their evolution induce and exacerbate the subjectivity of human response. Emotions ranging from love to loss are mined by the author for profit, here. Yet, for a young man in such a milieu, Frost is exceptionally mature and confident. As he avers;

They would not find me changed from him they knew-
Only sure of all I thought was true.

Thus, “A Boy’s Will” is a marker. It points us toward a road that Frost will spend his lifetime travelling, a road that will provide us with many illuminating vistas.