Robert Frost's the Death of the Hired Man

"Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." That's the best-remembered line from Robert Frost's long narrative poem, and it appears in this this prose adaptation of the work about, well, just what the title says. The old man comes to the farm he so often worked at, then left, only to return; the farmer doesn't want him there, worn out and useless, while the wife is tender hearted and talks him around.

There's a naturalness to the language here, a verisimilitude that runs through Frost's poetry, that always makes me wonder: is this the way people actually talk, or is it by practice that we learn to speak that way? There are few true masters of how Americans speak, writers you might not recognize, like Avram Davidson, or or you might not consider that way, like Dashiell Hammett. Keen observers of their fellow humans, whose works make sense sense when spoke out loud. Is Frost one of them? Sometimes I think so, and sometimes, think it's just his own particular voice.