"Came within an ace of dying. Pneumonia. They call it the old man's friend —it takes you easy. But they gave me tons of penicillin. I said to my doctor, 'What do you call penicillin if it's the enemy of the old man's friend?' I never thought it was the end, but I thought if I died it would help sell my books. You know, when you come close to death, you feel awestruck. It's not fear" As he talked last week in South Miami, Robert Frost walked slowly and carefully.
He did not yet quite trust his aging body after it's bout with the pneumonia that had nearly killed him the month before.
His hearing was uncertain, and the shock of hair that tumbled down his forehead and over one eye was as white as the first snow of December. Last month he was 88. But the familiar slightly husky tone still rang in the old man's voice as he talked about his recent sickness and his new slim volume of poems, In the Clearing, his first collection of new work to be published in 15 years.
Half & Half. Gradually, over the last three decades, Robert Frost has abandoned the subject matter that made him famous — woods softly filling with snow, the birches and stone walls of New Eng land, the brook in the back pasture, the tang in autumn air at apple-picking time — and he no longer attempts the lyric intensity of his earlier works. Increasingly, he is content with sententious verse written with the negligent, remembered skill of a master craftsman. The old man is fascinated by the adventuring spirit of man. Many of his poems are half wisdom and half whimsy, and Frost often seems to be sharing a sly, private joke with God. In fact, one couplet in In the Clearing offers God a bargain: Forgive, 0 Lord, my little jokes on Thee And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
Frost is plainly delighted with his new role among men since he recited his "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration. "President Kennedy gave me a kind of status that nobody ever had before," he says.
"It's been a new world for me. People come up to me in dining rooms. Of course, I think it's a little bit presumptuous to come across a dining room floor with a menu card and ask me to autograph it, but the people do it kindly." The ancient poet laureate of the New Frontier feels at home with the Kennedy Administration. "But I'm not a liberal.
There's some nonsense in liberalism. It's often bigoted, narrow-minded. I'm a sort of tough Democrat." Old Foxy Grandpa. Frost has always been one of the hardiest barnstormers in the academic world, but his pace has quickened to a sprint since the inauguration. He has taped radio interviews and allowed himself to be filmed for a movie documentary. He went to Israel for ten days as the guest of Hebrew University.