Notes
1] Frost saved this poem only because Edward Thomas, his friend the English poet and the E. T. of the title, "thought it so good a description of No Man's Land" (Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson [New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1964], p. 220).
Frost plays on several meanings in his title: determining the distance a bullet will travel; and discovering the variation of something from the smallest to the largest.
6] "A butterfly [that] its [the flower's] fall had dispossessed ..."
10] mullein: tall plant of the figwort family with spiky yellow flowers.
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Robert Frost, Mountain Interval (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), p. 36. PS 3511 R94 M6 ROBA.
First publication date:
1916
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/1/16
Composition date:
1902
Rhyme: abbabbaccdeed