Robert Frost

The Line-gang

HERE come the line-gang pioneering by.

Forest destruction

"Less cut than broken" suggests violence rather than careful harvesting. The line-gang doesn't fell trees cleanly—they demolish the landscape. This sets the poem's tone: progress through destruction.

They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead

Dead trees, living thread

Frost uses paradox here: dead wood becomes infrastructure, held together by a "living thread" (the electrical wire). The telegraph/telephone literally animates dead matter with transmitted words.

Dead trees, living thread

Frost uses paradox here: dead wood becomes infrastructure, held together by a "living thread" (the electrical wire). The telegraph/telephone literally animates dead matter with transmitted words.

They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.

Hush vs. noise

The contrast between "hushed as when they were a thought" and "in no hush they string it" is key. Words travel silently through the wire, but the workers themselves are loud and brutal—the technology contradicts the violence of its installation.

But in no hush they string it: they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taut,
To hold it hard until they make it fast,
To ease away—they have it. With a laugh,

"Oath of towns"

Not a religious oath—a curse or exclamation. "Towns that set the wild at naught" means settlements that dismiss wilderness as worthless. The workers embody this colonial attitude: civilization conquers nature through noise and force.

An oath of towns that set the wild at naught
They bring the telephone and telegraph.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

Technology as violent progress

Frost wrote this poem around 1915, when telephone and telegraph lines were still being strung across rural America. The poem captures a specific historical moment—the electrification of the landscape—but frames it not as progress but as invasion.

The line-gang doesn't build delicately; they "throw," "break," and "shout." Their tools are crude and their methods loud. Yet the irony is that what they're installing enables silent, invisible communication: words traveling "hushed" through wires. Frost juxtaposes the brutality of installation with the ethereal nature of transmitted speech. The dead wood poles carry living signals.

This is not celebration. The workers bring "the telephone and telegraph" with "a laugh, / An oath of towns that set the wild at naught." They're not heroes—they're agents of a civilization that treats the natural world as an obstacle to be demolished. Frost's sympathy lies with what's being destroyed, not with the technology being imposed.

Word choice: "pioneering" and "instrument"

"Pioneering" typically carries heroic connotations—settlers opening new land. But here it's ironic: these aren't explorers seeking knowledge; they're laborers installing commercial infrastructure. They're not discovering the landscape; they're erasing it.

"Instrument" is equally loaded. An instrument makes music or measures things. But Frost uses it for the telegraph wire strung "against the sky." The wire becomes an instrument that plays words instead of notes—a perverted instrument of civilization. Notice he doesn't call it a "line" or "cable" in this moment; he elevates it poetically, then immediately undercuts the elevation by showing how brutally it's installed. The gap between the sublime image and the crude reality is where the poem's meaning lives.