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Notes
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Notes

 
[1]

Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938 (1970), pp. 106, 108.

[2]

Printed first in Our Young Folks (March 1867); collected in John Townsend Trowbridge's The Vagabonds and Other Poems (1869).

[3]

Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life and Talks—Walking (1965), pp. 373, 195-196.

[4]

Printed in Thompson, Robert Frost, The Early Years, 1874-1915 (1966), p. 332.

[5]

The trip may have been in 1953; RF implies as much in the preliminary note printed above the poem in In The Clearing (1962), pp. 41-58, 'Back there in 1953 with the Huntington Cairnses.' However, in an earlier typescript of the second version, given by RF to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and dated 9 September 1957 (Barrett Library), the preliminary line is, 'Back there in fifty four with the Huntington Cairns.' For the sake of the chronological harmony of 'sixty years ago', we accept 1954. The exact date is not very important.

[6]

Part of this poem, comprising lines 220-224, 246-257 of the final version (with the variant reading 'Is' for 'Was' in line 254), was used in In The Clearing, p. 7, as the central theme of the book with the title, 'But God's Own Descent.'

[7]

Oliver Stewart, Aviation: The Creative Ideas (1966), pp. 17-35.