A Witness Tree

A Witness Tree gathers forty two poems into five sections, One or Two, Two or More, Time Out, Quantula and Over Back, three of them opening with sonnets, and it arrived at a period when Robert Frost had absorbed a run of personal losses: his daughter Marjorie died in 1934, his wife Elinor in 1938, and his son Carol by suicide in 1940. Rather than retreat from those losses, Frost let them sit underneath poems that keep his familiar surface of New England rock walls, leaves and small rural gestures, using those concrete, homely details to open onto questions of mortality, religion and how much of the world a person can actually know.

The collection's best known poem, The Gift Outright, addresses the country's own founding directly, a shift toward public, national subject matter that Frost had rarely attempted so plainly before; the poem later gained a much wider audience when Frost recited it at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural. Elsewhere in the book, Frost found unexpected new material in a late life romantic relationship with his secretary, Kay Morrison, whose presence runs quietly through several of the volume's love poems, a subject rare enough in Frost's earlier work to mark A Witness Tree as something genuinely new rather than a continuation of his established manner.

Frost's technique throughout stays close to his lifelong method: traditional forms, sonnets and heroic couplets handled so naturally that the meter rarely calls attention to itself, conversational diction, and an enjambment that lets a sentence's plain sense carry real irony underneath it. Critics have long treated this as the last of his books to keep the seamless lyric quality of his earlier work before his later verse turned more overtly philosophical. It suits any reader already fond of Frost's nature imagery who wants to see that same voice carrying real personal grief and, for the first time this directly, a public, historical subject as well.