As we continue to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Robert Frost’s 1923 book, “New  Hampshire,” it makes sense to turn at least some of our attention to standout poems from collections that preceded it. As early as 1914, with the publication of “North of Boston,” when he was 40, Frost was beginning to write what in hindsight we think of as such quintessentially “Robert Frost poems” as “Mending Wall” and “The Death of the Hired Man.” The 1916 volume “Mountain Interval,” meanwhile, following fast on the heels of the previous book, continued to reflect the poet’s voice as it matured and more fully realized itself.  

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Hyla Brook,” is a “Mountain Interval” poem. It keeps company with such better-known selections as “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and the terrifying “Out, Out — ,” whose tragedy introduces most starkly the bleak seam that cuts through the New England beauty: a grief casting its shadow on the pastoral sunshine. “Hyla Brook” is almost a sonnet, fifteen pentameter lines instead of fourteen. Its intricate rhyme scheme, abbaccaddeefgfg, departs from the Petrarchan mode after the first quatrain. Although, in the beguiling music of the first line, we hear the brook’s “song and speed,” what transpires is that “the brook’s run out of” those things. The frog species which gives it its name has evaporated with the spring mist. The brook itself has ceased to be a brook at all. If “we love the things we love for what they are,” then what we love is not the reality before us, but our memory of something that is, for the time being, no more.