The Line Gang

by Robert Frost

An interpretation

Robert Frost lived on a farm in New Hampshire in the early 20^th century. Rural areas are generally the last to get any modern invention or convenience. Frost watched as a line crew came past his farm providing the means for his part of the country to receive the latest methods of communication, the telephone and telegraph he mentions in the last line of the poem. You and I might watch such an occurrence with fascination and wonder, much as modern suburban dwellers might greet the crew tearing up the asphalt street to lay down fiber-optic cable. A poet like Frost watched with irony. Irony always involves surprise. It might be the surprise of witnessing the opposite of what we expect. It might be the surprise of hearing words used to mean the opposite of what they normally do. Sarcasm works this way. It might also be the surprise of seeing the unnatural right next to the natural.

This poem is a catalog of such surprises. Instead of cutting down a forest the way loggers would, the crew breaks the forest with a line just wide enough to carry their wire. They replace the living trees with the dead ones we now call telephone poles. But the dead trees are strung with a living wire, one which carries the sound of the human voice. And this living line, which carries either the morse code beaten out by a telegraph operator, or, somehow, miraculously, the living voice of humans, is strangely silent; it makes not a sound.

But the crew stringing the silent wire do so loudly “With shouts afar to pull the cable taut.” The poet marvels at the contradiction that is modern progress, that can so “set the wild at naught.”

The poem is 13 lines of interlocking rhyme [A-B-C-C-D-B-E-F-E-F-G-E-G]. All the lines consist of 10 syllables, except lines 2 and 6 which have 11. However, these lines end in what is called falling rhyme, “broken” and “spoken,” accounting for the extra syllable. All the other lines end with a stressed syllable. These two lines have an extra syllable which is unstressed, causing the voice to fall. Try reading and see if you get that.

The first 6 lines of the poem scan like this:

Here come’ the line’-gang pi’oneer’ing by.’

They throw’ a for’est down’ less cut’ than bro’ken.

They plant’ dead trees’ for liv’ing, and’ the dead’

They string’ togeth’er with’ a liv’ing thread.’

They string’ an in’strument’ against’ the sky’

Where’ in words’ whe’ther beat’en out’ or spo’ken.

There is certainly variation in the stress pattern of line 6. Would it be too much to suggest the falling rhyme represents the poet’s falling heart for the fallen trees which “set the wild at naught?”