A Time To Talk

It is tempting, on first read, to find in Frost’s narrative a simple endorsement of friends, quaint and folksy as an old-school Pepperidge Farm commercial. After all, the speaker describes the conversation he is about to have as a “friendly visit” (Line 10), which is of course not the same thing as a visit between friends. The reader wants the two to be good friends. After all, the genre of so-called hospitality poems was a major expression of poetry in both Victorian England and in Gilded Age America, poems that celebrated the uncomplicated support and love between friends and that offered inspirational, uplifting reminders of the virtue of others.

But Frost is, well, too much Frost to allow such a theme to go unquestioned. The two characters in the poem are never given a context, never given backstories, indeed never even given genders or names. There is really no reliable textual evidence to define the level of their friendship or even who they are—Is this a good friend? An acquaintance? A neighbor? A relative? A stranger hailing him for directions? Their conversation begins just after the poem ends—so there is no way, at least textually, to define this relationship.

Frost creates the ambiguity to give the poem its widest possible thematic reach.