The Hill Wife by Robert Frost

ONE ought not to have to care

:So much as you and I

Care when the birds come round the house

Bird Metaphor

Frost uses birds as a complex symbol of transience and emotional distance. Notice how they're both present and absent.

:To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back

:With whatever it is they sing;

The truth being we are as much

:Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here—

:With birds that fill their breasts

But with each other and themselves

:And their built or driven nests.

Always—I tell you this they learned—

Always at night when they returned

To the lonely house from far away

To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,

They learned to rattle the lock and key

To give whatever might chance to be

Warning and time to be off in flight:

And preferring the out- to the in-door night,

They learned to leave the house-door wide

Until they had lit the lamp inside.

I didn’t like the way he went away.

That smile! It never came of being gay.

Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure!

Poverty Subtext

Economic vulnerability shapes their relationship. 'Only bread' reveals their precarious social status.

Perhaps because we gave him only bread

And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.

Perhaps because he let us give instead

Of seizing from us as he might have seized.

Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,

Or being very young (and he was pleased

To have a vision of us old and dead).

I wonder how far down the road he’s got.

He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

She had no saying dark enough

:For the dark pine that kept

Landscape as Psychological Space

The pine tree becomes a living, threatening presence—representing her internal emotional landscape.

Forever trying the window-latch

:Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands

:That with every futile pass

Made the great tree seem as a little bird

:Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,

:And only one of the two

Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream

:Of what the tree might do.

It was too lonely for her there,

:And too wild,

And since there were but two of them,

:And no child,

And work was little in the house,

:She was free,

And followed where he furrowed field,

:Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed

:The fresh chips,

With a song only to herself

:On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough

:Of black alder.

She strayed so far she scarcely heard

:When he called her—

And didn’t answer—didn’t speak—

:Or return.

She stood, and then she ran and hid

Implied Abandonment

Her disappearance is both literal and metaphorical. The sudden departure suggests deep marital estrangement.

:In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked

:Everywhere,

And he asked at her mother’s house

:Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that

:The ties gave,

And he learned of finalities

:Besides the grave.