In "The Line Gang" Robert Frost describes a team of men
who are setting telephone and telegraph wires.
They begin
by cutting down a forest, "replanting" the logs as telephone poles, and then stringing
wires between the poles:
They throw a forest down
less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the
dead
They string together with a living
thread.
The wires will carry words, either spoken
on a telephone or "beaten out" on a telegraph; as the words travel along the wire,
however, they will be "as hushed as when they were a thought." The men, though, do not
work quietly: "they go past /
With shouts
afar."
Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963; he
witnessed the rapid transformation of America from a mostly rural country to a mostly
urban superpower. In his personal life, he experienced urban life in his hometown of
San Francisco and rural life in his adopted home of New
England.
In "The Line Gang," Frost seems to be considering
the progress of industrialization and urbanization. His attitude toward this process is
not simplistically "for" or "against." He observes that the forest has been left
"broken" by the chopping down of trees, but he also seems to admire the power and
potential of the telephone and telegraph that can "set the wild at
naught."
Critics have observed that Frost often expresses a
"double" vision in his poems. This can be seem in "The Line
Gang."
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