While stopped silently in the woodland by the farmhouse, Frost understood that it was time to establish financial stability in his life. It was the genesis of his American masterpiece, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: Distraught, he halted his horse in the snow. Just scraping by, it abruptly struck him that he did not have money enough to buy the gifts for his children. Frost remembered the exact date as he experienced an epiphany on that night of the solstice. 21, 1905, on his way to Derry Village to Christmas shop.

Michele McDonaldĪnd bordering the farm are the very woods that the poet passed through with his horse and wagon on the evening of Dec. The soapstone sink in the kitchen is the one the Frosts actually used, and shows the nicks where they sharpened their knives. My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree (Frost, himself, acknowledged in a letter, “The core of all my writing was probably the five free years I had on the farm.”) There is the fork in the path where a signpost informs you of “the road not taken.” Will you take “the one less traveled by?” And there are two gnarled apple trees that remain from the 100-tree apple, peach, and quince orchard of Frost’s day - an orchard that later inspired the poem “After Apple-Picking”: There, for example, you will come upon the very wall that gave rise to “Mending Wall,” and other ordinary spots that the poet elevated to worldwide fame. This self-guided walking trail wends its way among the lawns, woodlands, pastures, and stone walls of the farm, passing 14 signposts that marry Frost’s poetry to actual sites along the way.

The site’s most engaging attractions, however, are free of charge and located outdoors along a half-mile “poetry loop,” open dawn to dusk, 365 days a year. Red floors like the ones in the Frost farm house were common in New Hampshire, because red paint was cheap, which is also why there were so many red barns.

Poem stopping by the woods