Though Robert Frost (1874–1963) is considered the quintessential New England poet, he was born in San Francisco. After the death of his father when Frost was eleven years old, the family moved to Massachusetts. Frost attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University, but in both cases he left early to support his family. He delivered newspapers, farmed, worked in a factory, and taught high school and college, but he considered poetry his true calling. Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for his collections New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1924), Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937), and A Witness Tree (1943). In 1961, Frost recited one of his poems at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.

Reluctance

Published in 1914, “Reluctance” was inspired somewhat by a trip Frost made to North Carolina’s Dismal Swamp after Elinor White, who later became his wife, refused his first marriage proposal.

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;

5

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

10

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;

15

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

20

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?

(1914)