T. S. Eliot Book

I've taught half a dozen of these poems for forty years, many from memory, first, The Pasture. My Crocket Ridge, Maine, grandparents really had a pasture spring, the cow Polly, and yearly calf--whom Polly defended from the dog Jerome by lifting my brother, in front of the dog, over the stone wall. The spring had great water, down a couple feet, and of course a frog living there. The Tuft of Flowers (the mower spared) I have growing in my back yard, in fact a dozen of them: orange Butterfly Weed, Asclepias Tuberosa. (Perhaps only Pritchard's edition keeps the line, "Finding them Butterfly Weed when I came" after "I left my place to know them by their name.") Speaking of Pritchard, Frost was his interlocutor, and a presence at my undergrad Amherst College. (I published a poem, After the Fall, on JFK and my teacher MacLeish dedicating the Frost Library a month before Dallas. My first poem in that publication, Ars Docentis, compares leading cows like Polly and leading classes: on heifers, "They.. attack afraid/ And retreat feeling real brave. There's/ No understanding them…)
By memory, The Road Not Taken, which every reader, every student, thinks describes their life--that remarkable, emphatic use of line end as conversational pause in colloquial repetition: "I--/ I took the one less travelled by…." Such a New England poem, yet written in England, perhaps recalling NE.
Lots of my Frost teaching was aloudreading in class: say, Home Burial. One student, narrator, I the husband, another student, the wife despising the husband, who says a remarkable line, the reason I grabbed the part: "What was it brought you up to think it the thing/ To take your mother-loss…"
"What was it" does not sound like a pentameter, but it is with one extra syllable on the last foot.
Or aloudreading, because my students were 2/3 women, average age mid-twenties, A Servant to Servants, where students read it all--a woman driven crazy by housing her mad brother-in-law, but mostly by servitude, though living with great views. Driving in N NH I think of her Lake Willoughby: "There's more to it than just window-views/ And living by a lake." I think that in my hometown too, all the ocean-views. (No more to it?) The best definition of "housework" in all lit: "doing/ Things over and over that just won't stay done."