Robert Frost (1874–1963) was still finding his feet when his first book of poems, “A Boy’s Will,” was published in England in 1913. (The first American edition wouldn’t appear till 1915, making it his second book in America, after the 1914 “North of Boston.”) Starting a modernist turn, he was still threading his way through late Romantic forms and poetic devices, not yet quite having found the American conversational voice in seamless rhyme and meter that would, in his later work, be his highly individual but nearly perfect resolution to the tension between the new modernist impulses in poetry and the deep historical force of traditional work. You can hear the younger poet’s voice in the opening lines of today’s Poem of the Day, “October,” from “A Boy’s Will”: “O hushed October morning mild, / Thy leaves have ripened to the fall.” The later poet would usually eschew the inversion of “morning mild” and the deliberate poetic archaism of “Thy leaves.” 

But the promise of Robert Frost shines through “October.” He has mastered meter and rhymes, found the topics of nature that he would claim as his own, and figured out how to structure a poetic argument. Thus, for example, at the end of the first quatrain, he lets the poem’s tetrameter fall back to a two-foot line, “Should waste them all,” setting up the powerfully shortened line “Slow, slow,” later in the poem. As he asks October to slow down and be gentle, he turns to the farmer’s knowledge and begs for gentle hours to save the fruit — saving us the fruit of our summers, too: “For the grapes’ sake along the wall.”

October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost —
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.