The Times Table
The Times Table - context Summary
Published 1942
This short poem was published in 1942 as part of Robert Frost’s collection A Witness Tree. Its context is primarily literary: it appears amid Frost’s mature work and uses a rural scene to stage a wry, unsettling proverb about life, death, and human influence on nature. The poem records a farmer’s aphorism—"the multiplication table of life"—and then steps back to note how uttering such maxims can justify harm, depopulation, or abandonment. Knowing its 1942 publication situates it in Frost’s later output and invites readers to weigh its ironic moral tone.
Read Complete AnalysesMore than halfway up the pass Was a spring with a broken drinking glass, And whether the farmer drank or not His mare was sure to observe the spot By cramping the wheel on a water-bar, turning her forehead with a star, And straining her ribs for a monster sigh; To which the farmer would make reply, ‘A sigh for every so many breath, And for every so many sigh a death. That’s what I always tell my wife Is the multiplication table of life.’ The saying may be ever so true; But it’s just the kind of a thing that you Nor I, nor nobody else may say, Unless our purpose is doing harm, And then I know of no better way To close a road, abandon a farm, Reduce the births of the human race, And bring back nature in people’s place.
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