SHAFTSBURY, Vt. --The most striking thing about Robert Frost was his eyes. My mother remembers how piercing they were, the palest of blue, and how everyone whispered when he walked in to the Bennington bank where she worked summers as a teller.
Few got to know the poet, but everyone knew where he lived: in the little stone cottage a few miles north of town, in Shaftsbury. For years my mother rode by it, wondering how it looked inside. This fall, 40 years after the poet's death, she found out.
Now a museum, the home dates from about 1769. Its stone walls are two feet thick, its roof steeply pitched to shed winter snows. A gabled window overlooks the front, though the trim was red, not white as it is now. Only the pine-floored downstairs is open to visitors. At first glance, the place seems modest, but Frost, who lived here from 1920 to 1929, was never well-to-do. Yet it was during his time here that his fourth book of verse, "New Hampshire," won him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.
The sparsely furnished rooms contain few personal objects, focusing more on Frost's poetry, thoughts, and life. The dining room table, where "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" came to him in a rush one hot June morning in 1922, is gone.
All in all, Frost inhabited 40 houses, five in Vermont. Yet this one was special: his four children were thriving, his wife in good health (she would die of a heart attack in 1938), and his career flourishing. Yet the writings and photographs here show a man who spent much of his time outdoors.
In his 1999 biography, "Robert Frost: A Life," Jay Parini argues that it was the shade trees, the apple orchard, the sugar maples, and the farming potential that lured Frost to Shaftsbury. The house, while adequate, needed work.
"It's not that Frost took more stock in nature than home," says Carole Thompson, the museum's founder. "Frost's poems are always about the human being and human feelings, but the setting is nature."
We stepped outside to see it. The meadows, once open, are now forested, and Route 7A is paved over. But the stone walls, apple trees, and woods that became his metaphors -- and that my mother had overlooked -- are still here. Suddenly we saw them in a new light, and as Frost might have said, it has made all the difference.
