Full of Halloween imagery, Frost's "The Witch of Coös" appeared in his collection titled New Hampshire, his first effort to win the Pulitzer Prize.
In Robert Frost’s “The Witch of Coös,” the speaker opens the poem, saying that he spent a winter evening “for shelter at a farm” hosted by “two old-believers” who were a mother and a son. The speaker then merely reports what the mother and son talked about. “They did all the talking,” he claims.
A mother and son drama
The poem is a drama, whose form resembles Frost’s other long story-poems, such as “Home Burial,” and “The Hill Wife.” This particular story is fit for this season of Halloween, and apparently, it is often read at scout camp-outs.
The poem is presented similar to a play, with the conversation marked by “Mother” and “Son.” The speaker, spending the cold winter evening with the mother and son, is likely a traveler who has simply asked for a night’s lodging before he hits the trail again in the morning.
Mother is a witch or is she?
The mother opens the subject of witchcraft, claiming that people think that a witch who won’t entertain guests with magic should be burned at the stake. The son then adds, “Mother can make a common table rear / And kick with two legs like an army mule.” For some reason, the pair wants the guest to believe that the mother is indeed a witch, but there is never any solid evidence to support that suggestion.
The bones in the attic
The son brings up the subject of the bones: “SON. You wouldn't want to tell him what we have / Up attic, mother? // MOTHER. Bones---a skeleton.” Then the mother explains how the bones got in the attic. At first, they were in the cellar, where she and her deceased husband buried them forty years earlier. Then one night the skeleton climbed up the cellar stairway, and the mother opened the door, and the skeleton made its way to the attic.
Her husband and she nailed up the attic door to keep the skeleton from getting out. Apparently, it enjoyed going through doorways.
Why was there a skeleton in the cellar?
The mother suggests the reason for the bones being buried in the cellar: “Let them stay in the attic since they went there. / I promised Toffile to be cruel to them / For helping them be cruel once to him.”
Apparently, the mother and the man who used to inhabit the bones had done something “cruel” to the mother’s husband. The reader is never told exactly what the act was, but there are many hints that lead to the assumption that they committed adultery, and instead of killing her, the husband killed her lover, and they buried him in the cellar.
Commentary
The mother is obviously a victim of hallucinatory guilt. She is not a witch; her mind has become twisted trying to live with her guilt. It is possible that the son, with whom she still lives, is the result of her liaison with the skeleton/lover and not her husband. If so, she has lived with the constant reminder of her infidelity for the past forty years.
The infidelity issue is so subtle that even children can relate to the Halloween-like imagery, which likely accounts for it being used by scouts around campfires. Some colorful images are: “It left the cellar forty years ago / And carried itself like a pile of dishes / Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,” “If I could see it, or else mow the room, / With our arms at the level of our knees, / And bring the chalk-pile down,” and “Behind the door and headboard of the bed, / Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers, / With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter.”
Other Frost articles:
- Farmer/Poet Frost: Analysis of Robert Frost’s “Putting in the Seed”
- Robert Frost’s Golden Moments: “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
- Frost’s “Birches”: Going Toward Heaven
- Robert Frost: A Lone Wolf
- Frost’s ‘The Oven Bird’
- Frost’s "Mending Wall"
- Frost’s Snow and Woods
- Robert Frost’s Tricky Poem
- Robert Frost’s "Bereft": Hissing Leaves
