Book: A Boy's Will

Overview
Robert Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will (1913), presents a young speaker’s inward journey through solitude, desire, labor, and memory, set against the fields and woods of New England. Published in London while Frost was living abroad, the volume announces his characteristic voice: plainspoken yet wary, lyrical yet edged with irony. The title echoes Longfellow’s refrain “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,” signaling a meditation on youthful impulse and the long thoughts of early life. Read as a sequence, the poems move from self-assertion toward chastened reflection, sketching the education of feeling that will underlie Frost’s later work.

Shape and Themes
Frost loosely orders the collection as a progression. Early pieces such as “Into My Own” imagine the self withdrawing into deep woods to grow large in solitude; others like “Ghost House” and “My November Guest” dwell on chosen loneliness, finding strange companionship in absence, old homesteads, and autumnal moods. A middle group confronts love and obligation: “Love and a Question” weighs hospitality against the uncertain demands of love; “A Dream Pang” and “A Line-Storm Song” register the tug between attachment and the urge to keep free. The later poems temper independence with recognition of kinship and fate. “The Tuft of Flowers” discovers, in a fellow worker’s spared clump of blossoms, a sudden fellowship across time; “Reluctance,” which closes the book, contemplates endings, asking what it means to yield when the heart resists.

Nature as Mirror
The New England landscape is never mere backdrop. In “Mowing,” the scythe’s whisper refuses romantic fancies and honors the “fact” of work as its own sweetness. “A Late Walk” traces a path through spent fields to a solitary violet, an image of fragile persistence. “Going for Water” catches moonlit play at a woodland brook, the gleam of discovery shadowed by distance from home. “Pan with Us” and “The Demiurge’s Laugh” startle the local with mythic presences, suggesting that the rural scene harbors larger, older energies. Throughout, natural details register weather in the mind: clouds, stone walls, leaf-fall, and thaw serve as emblems for change, endurance, and the limits of wishing.

Youth, Freedom, and Restraint
The speaker’s will tests itself against custom and necessity. He values the right to wander and to hold his counsel, yet the poems return him to human claims. The imagined flight “into my own” yields to ordinary ties discovered in work shared, roads traveled, and doors opened or shut. Love appears not as rapture alone but as a problem of choice and consequence; hospitality, secrecy, promise, and doubt create the moral weather in which feeling must stand.

Voice and Style
Most poems speak in the first person, intimate without confession. Frost favors traditional meters and clear rhyme, including occasional sonnets and ballad measures, but he lets speech-cadence roughen the smoothness. The diction is homely and exact; symbols arise from use rather than allegory. A quiet skepticism checks high abstraction, while moments of sudden recognition, an intact clump of flowers, a violet at season’s end, give grace to ordinary acts.

Place in Frost’s Work
A Boy’s Will establishes the central concerns Frost would revisit: the pull between solitude and community, the discipline of labor, the moral testing-ground of rural life, and the way external seasons shape inner weather. Its youthful will grows wary without growing cold, finding in the local scene a durable measure for desire, duty, and the long thoughts that begin a poet’s career.