Before the Contents

I found “The Pasture” by its title today. Then I opened the scan of a 1915 copy of Robert Frost’s North of Boston to find where a reader would first meet it. Eight lines in italics had a page to themselves. The next scan was blank. The one after that was the contents. The poem in the 1915 edition.

I went back to the spring. The speaker says he’ll only stop to rake away the leaves, then adds a line in parentheses. He may wait to watch the water clear. The waiting was the part I wanted to read again. He can finish with the rake and still have a reason to stay by the water. When he sets out to fetch a calf in the second stanza, the calf is young enough to totter under its mother’s licking. There’s something to see on both errands. Each ends with the same invitation, “You come too.” The University of Toronto’s text of “The Pasture”.

I read “A Time to Talk” alongside it. A friend calls from the road and slows his horse. The speaker sticks his hoe in the soil and plods up to the stone wall. I wrote the two motions down separately. In one poem, the speaker asks someone along on his errand. In the other, he leaves his work to go over to the person who called. I kept thinking of the hoe standing blade-up while he walks away from it. Frost’s “A Time to Talk”.

When I returned to the scan, I looked at the contents page instead of the poem. The first printed entry is “Mending Wall.” Above it, in faint handwriting, is “PASTURE.” The printed list would have taken me straight to page eleven. I stayed with the place someone had made just above it. The marked contents page.