In "A Roadside Stand," American poet Robert Frost presents a gloomy view of rural life in the United States during the Great Depression. Observing a sad little "roadside stand" hawking berries and squash to indifferent city people (who just zip past in their cars), the poem's speaker notes that the farmers who run such stands are suffering in more ways than one. They're living in poverty, yes—but they've also been deluded by false dreams of the new life that an infusion of "city money" could give them. Falling for the "moving-pictures' promise" (that is, illusory Hollywood glamor), these farmers lose touch with their traditions and risk assimilation into a selfish urban way of life. Frost first published this poem in the Atlantic in 1936; he collected it that same year in his book A Further Range.
The speaker describes a little shack of a fruit stall built onto the side of an old farmhouse and reaching out to the edge of the road. This roadside stall seems to be begging piteously for more than just a handout; instead, it's begging for a little bit of the money that enriches people who live in cities. Gleaming cars rush right by this stand without noticing it at all—or, if they do notice it, it's only to be annoyed by interruption to the pretty countryside landscape: the clumsy signs with backwards letters offering berries and squash and the opportunity to rest and enjoy some lovely mountain scenery. The people in these cars have some cash, the speaker thinks angrily, but if they want to be tightfisted, then they'd better just keep it and drive on. The speaker wouldn't complain that these stands mar the view; rather, they feel troubled by the sad message they read in these stands, which seem to be saying: "We've put this fruit stall up out here in the countryside in order to try to get a little money from the city—to see if it will make us feel like we're living bigger lives, like the kinds of lives we see in the movies, the kinds of lives that the government, we hear, is stopping us from having."
The newspapers report that, in an act of supposed mercy, all these poor folks living in the countryside are going to be collected and brought to live in villages, close to the theaters and the shops, where they'll no longer have to think for themselves. The people who want to make this change, the speaker observes, claim to be benefactors, but really they're predators: they're trying to take away the country people's old ways of being and lull them into a complacent sleep.
The speaker can't stand the thought of how much the country people naively long for bigger, richer lives. These sad folks wait near an open window all day, all but praying for one car (out of the thousands that selfishly drive past) to stop, even if it's just to ask how much something costs. A car did stop once—but only to turn around, churning up the grass in the yard on the way. Another driver asked directions; another asked if the farmer could sell them some gas, to which the farmer angrily replied, "We don't have any, can't you see?"
The speaker can hear the voice of the countryside complaining that the kind of freedom and happiness money is meant to give you can't be found in the kind of cash you make as a rural person. It would be a relief, the speaker reflects, to just put these poor people out of their misery. But when they return to their sanity and reflect on that idea the next day, they ask themselves: how would I like it if someone offered to euthanize me?
“A Roadside Stand” offers a dismayed snapshot of the relationship between the countryside and the cities in early-20th-century America (and, in particular, during the Great Depression, which drove countless people into poverty). In this poem, a speaker looks in despair upon a dynamic in which the rural poor are forced to beg for a little money from the urban rich. Not only has all wealth flowed to the cities, the speaker observes, but a money-grubbing, citified way of seeing the world has infected the rural population, threatening the American countryside and its traditional ways of life.
The poem describes a shabby little “roadside stand” that a farming family has built onto the side of their house, hoping to earn a little money by selling produce to the “polished traffic” that whizzes by every day. This stand, the speaker says, is “pathetically ple[ading]” not simply for a living, but for “city money”: a symbolically loaded kind of cash. To the rural people who set up this stand, “city money” represents a dream of glamor and importance, an opportunity to live the life of the “moving-pictures’ promise” (that is, a Hollywood dream). The speaker can only see this longing as a “pitiful” loss of dignity and wisdom.
For things weren’t always like this, the speaker suggests. Rural people used to live in an “ancient way,” “think[ing] for themselves” as they supported their families with what they could grow. Now, an increasingly urbanized world devalues such ways of life, and even seeks to destroy them.
The “polished traffic” from the cities doesn’t take a second look at the farmers’ little “roadside stand”; city people don’t have much sympathy for, interest in, or understanding of country people’s lives. But they do have a sense of what country people might be worth to them, on their own terms. Urban bureaucrats and government officials—“greedy good-doers,” as the speaker calls them—plot to “b[uy out]” the farmers’ land and “gather [rural people] in” to the cities, offering them ease and comfort in exchange for their independence, their traditions, their land, and their labor. The farmers’ “childish” view of “city money,” the speaker suggests, means that they’re going to be completely taken in by this bad deal.
In the speaker’s eyes, then, the life of the countryside might already be doomed. Impoverished rural communities aren’t fighting back against the encroachment of urban values and urban wealth. Instead, they’ve fallen for a false dream of what “city money” might do for them. The speaker despairs over this loss to the point that they find a startling “relief” in the idea of putting rural people “at one stroke out of their pain”—of simply euthanizing the whole rural population before things can get even worse for them.
The speaker of this poem feels deeply saddened by the struggles of people living in rural poverty. But they also feel aggravated and frustrated by these rural people’s ideas about what getting out of poverty might mean and look like. The American culture that Frost observes in “A Roadside Stand” is at once motivated by money and deluded by fantasies of what money means.
The farmers who set up their “roadside stand” do so in the hopes of squeezing a little big-city cash from the urban drivers who zip past their home. Those hopes aren’t merely to do with earning money for necessities (though the farmers are clearly very poor: they don’t even have a “gallon of gas” to sell to those few drivers who do stop by). Rather, they’re to do with the fantasy of a “lift of spirit,” a kind of buoyant, glamorous new perspective on life that only city money can offer.
The speaker imagines the farmers spelling out exactly what they’re hoping for: the life of the “moving-pictures’ promise,” the kind of life they see in the movies. To them, in other words, “city money” offers a dream of glamor and luxury. If they had city cash, they believe, it might make their very “being expand,” turning them into people who feel bigger. Their dream of “city money” is a dream of self-satisfaction, confidence, and importance as much as comfort.
The speaker clearly sees this dream as fantastical, illusory, and painfully pathetic. The “trusting sorrow” of the poor people who believe in the “moving-pictures’ promise,” in Hollywood fantasies of wealth, strikes them as tragic. While they’re troubled by the rural folks’s “childish” belief in such dreams, they’re also implicitly critical of the people who implant those dreams: the movies reflect a wider cultural attitude that suggests money is a thing of value and importance in itself.
This poem’s speaker observes that urban bureaucrats and government officials are just aching to get their hands on the land and labor of rural people: these “greedy good-doers” are busy cooking up plans to “b[uy] out” farmland and tempt rural populations into the cities. This, the speaker feels, would be a great loss to rural folks. While they’d live in greater comfort and convenience, they also wouldn’t “have to think for themselves anymore.” Rural ways of life, the poem implies, have a kind of value that a money-driven society simply doesn’t recognize: living close to the land connects people to tradition, to natural beauty, and to a rare independence.
People who live and work in the countryside, the speaker says, are involved in an “ancient way” of life. Farming demands that they “think for themselves,” independently solving their problems in order to carve out a living. This is clearly a difficult life (and one that doesn’t bring them any great wealth), but it’s an honest one. By contrast, a convenient urban life in “villages, next to the theatre and the store” can only inspire a metaphorical “sleep”: its ease is numbing.
Country life also puts people in touch with the worth and goodness of nature. The speaker respectfully describes the goods on sale at a little “roadside stand”: alongside tempting-sounding “wild berries,” the farmers offer “crook-necked golden squash with silver warts,” an image that suggests there’s real value in a humble squash—a different kind of value than the value of gold and silver coins. Less tangibly, the stand can also offer “beauty rest in a beautiful mountain scene,” the opportunity to be restored by nature’s glory.
Urban drivers zip right past these offers without even stopping to notice them. But the rewards of living close to nature, the speaker suggests, are real. It’s only a shame that even country people seem to be forgetting the value of their rural lives.
The little old ...
... and withering faint.
“A Roadside Stand” begins with a startling description of a little produce stand that a farmer has set up on the edge of a rural road. This description isn’t startling because of the stand itself: the stand is perfectly unassuming, a “little new stand” growing out of the side of the farmer’s “little old house.” The diacope of “little” makes it clear that neither house nor stand feels all that impressive or significant.
Instead, what’s startling here is the speaker’s perspective on this stand. They seem hardly to be able to bear looking at it: it “too pathetically” begs for just a little bit of “the money, the cash” that “flow[s]” through the cities. The stand’s pathetic, insistent begging leeches into the poem’s very shape. This first stanza kicks off with four rhymes in a row, shed / sped / pled / bread, creating a nagging sound that suggests this stand’s transparent pleas for cash aren’t particularly sophisticated either.
Remarking on the stand’s pleas, the speaker observes that “it would not be fair” to say the stand is begging for “a dole” (or share) “of bread.” A "dole" can also refer money/benefits given to the unemployed by the government, and the phrase "a dole of bread" evokes the poem's context: "A Roadside Stand" was published in 1936, when the U.S. was in the middle of the Great Depression. Unemployment was rampant, as were charitable breadlines.
However, the speaker is saying here that the stand isn’t the equivalent of a panhandler asking for a handout or trying to scrape together enough pennies for a meal. Instead, it’s making a play for something a little more ambitious: some of the “cash” that keeps “the flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.” The roadside stand, in other words, is trying to divert just a little urban wealth its own way.
That (literally) flowery metaphor of cities as blossoms jars against the blunt, awkward tone of the poem so far. There's also something jarring in the idea of money as the nourishing force that makes these dainty blooms grow—a strange juxtaposition of nature and finance! There might be a hint of a sneer in the speaker’s voice as they imagine cities as flowers that “wither” if they aren’t supplied with enough cold hard cash, flowers at once delicate and indelicately money-focused.
But the metaphor also suggests that the rural people of this roadside stand might be feeling a little withered, too. They need cash as much as the people of the cities do, but they don’t have access to that kind of wealth; it’s the “cities” that have the real money here.
These first lines thus establish a few points:
Frost invents his own form here. This 51-line poem uses long, irregular stanzas, and it’s written in accentual meter (that is, a meter that uses a regular number of beats—five, in this case, as in “A roadside stand that too pathetically pled”—but doesn’t stick to any one metrical foot, like the iamb or the trochee). The poem's rhymes are irregular too, never falling into a pattern. All of these choices together make the poem feel conversational, flexible, and sometimes rather wild. That helps to capture the voice of a down-to-earth speaker who will nonetheless come to the brink of despair as they survey the world around them.
The polished traffic ...
... S turned wrong
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... and go along.
The hurt to ...
... keeping from us.
It is in ...
... the ancient way.
Sometimes I feel ...
... farmer's prices are.
And one did ...
... didn't it see?
No, in country ...
... seems to complain.
I can't help ...
... of my pain.
The sad little roadside stand becomes a symbol for the lives and beliefs of the impoverished rural people who run it. Like these poor farmers, the stand is pretty shabby. It’s nothing but a little “shed,” with signs out front whose “N turned wrong and S turned wrong” reveal the farmers’ near-illiteracy. No one stops to buy produce from the stand, either; it’s a cry of hope for a better life that goes unanswered.
Perhaps most tellingly of all, this roadside stand is planted and stationary, rooted in one spot—in marked contrast to the “polished cars” in which city people zip by on the road. The farmers, the symbol of the stand suggests, are stuck where they are, unable to move out of their poverty. By the same token, though, they’re rooted in a way the mobile urbanites can’t be. The speaker’s pun on making a “roadside stand” also suggests that the stand represents a moral or cultural stand, a way of stating “ancient” countryside values. Alas, those values are looking pretty unsustainable and rickety.
The "polished traffic" that passes the roadside stand by symbolizes the urban rich and their selfish, short-sighted attitudes. In spite of the sad little roadside stand's hopes, cars never seem to stop to buy its wares. If they ever do stop, it's only to serve their own purposes: to reverse over the lawn, to ask for directions, or to try to buy a "gallon of gas" from farmers who aren't rich enough to have any such thing on hand. The "polish[]" on these heartless cars suggests that their drivers have plenty of money to spare; they could certainly drop a few cents on a basket of "wild berries." But they don't. They're intent on "keep[ing their] money," hoarding what they have.
The traffic's behavior reflects the general attitude of rich urban people toward poor country people: they overlook them, misunderstand them, and (if they notice them at all) are unwilling to help them. The cars' swift, thoughtless movement also suggests that the urban world has its eyes fixed "ahead," restlessly moving toward the future, while the rural people with their "roadside stand" stay rooted in tradition and in the past.
“A Roadside Stand” is built around a juxtaposition between the rural poor and the urban rich. That juxtaposition also reveals a commonality between these apparently opposed groups: both have false and misguided ideas about value and wealth.
The speaker reveals some of the big differences between rural and urban folks with the symbolic image of a sad little “roadside stand” from which farmers attempt to hawk berries and squash to drivers in “polished” cars. The stand is stationary and shabby, the cars are on the move and glossy: these images sum up the speaker’s initial attitudes to country vs. city. The rural people, the stand suggests, live in poverty, but they’re also rooted; they make a “roadside stand” in more senses than one, building a literal stand but also taking a stand for their livelihood. The urbanites, meanwhile, are wealthy and on the go, always looking "ahead" to somewhere else, no longer in touch with the ground they drive over or the people they drive past.
Though the farmers make a stand in a certain sense, they’re also tormented by longings for what the city people have (or appear to have): a kind of wealth that, the farmers suspect, allows them to live the kinds of glamorous lives they see in the “moving-pictures.” This “childish,” fantastical idea of wealth is part of what makes them set up their roadside stands in the first place. So impoverished that they don’t even have a “gallon of gas” to spare, they dream not just of financial security but of a different kind of life altogether.
The urbanites, meanwhile, would like nothing more than to give the rural people the new lives they crave—or some illusion of those lives. “Greedy good-doers,” the speaker acidly observes, would love to move poor rural people into cities where they could soak up their cheap labor. The only price? The “ancient way” of life the farmers live, and their ability to “think for themselves.” The cities, in other words, want not to help but to assimilate the poor people of the countryside, overriding old values and virtues with glossy, superficial new ones.
There’s a connection between the rural poor and the urban rich, then: both have their eyes a little too firmly fixed on an illusory dream of wealth. This dilemma just about drives the observing speaker to thoughts of putting the farmers (but not, interestingly, the city folks) “out of their pain.”
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Begged. The speaker personifies the stand as piteously begging for passing drivers to stop.
“A Roadside Stand” tells its tale in a flexible, almost conversational form. The poem is built from 51 lines divided into four irregular stanzas, all written in five-beat accentual meter. In other words, the lines consistently use five beats, but they don’t stick to a regular metrical foot like the iamb or the trochee. The rhyme scheme is flexible, too: while there’s plenty of rhyme, it never falls into a predictable shape. Instead, it either meanders or insists, moving from strings of four rhymes in a row (as in lines 1-4) to passages in which a rhyme word doesn't meet its match until many lines later (as in the rhyme between "wrong" in line 10 and "along" in line 15).
There’s a crafted poetic form here, then, but also a spontaneous, shifty, and surprising one. The sudden lurches in the rhyme, the varied lengths of the stanzas, and the steady-but-irregular rhythm of the meter all capture the speaker’s agitated, nervous state of mind as they contemplate the greed and folly of urbanites and countryfolk alike.
Watching urban people drive heartlessly past a pitiful “roadside stand” offering produce for sale—and watching rural people fall prey to illusions of a wealthy life like the one they see in the “moving-pictures”—makes this speaker feel restless and disillusioned. Sometimes, they worry about being driven to desperation by their disgust, knowing they’re not quite “sane” when they imagine putting all the poor misguided farmers “out of their pain.” The poem’s loose but insistent shape and sound help to highlight the speaker’s volatile state of mind.
"A Roadside Stand" is written in accentual meter. In accentual meter, the poet doesn't stick to a single dominant metrical foot (like the da-DUM of the iamb or the DUM-da-da of the dactyl), but measures lines out by the number of beats they contain—in this case, five beats a line. Lines 16-17 provide a nice example:
The hurt to the scenery wouldn't be my complaint
So much as the trusting sorrow of what is unsaid:
These lines feel at once rhythmic and naturalistic. The driving five-beat pulse is noticeable, but there's plenty of room in it for a flexibility that makes the speaker's voice sound conversational—as if they're a character in the poem, involved in the world they describe rather than pronouncing on it from a literary height.
The way that Frost lands his stresses here makes the speaker sound a little pugnacious, too. Almost every line of the poem ends on a strong stress, a choice that feels bold and even aggressive (especially when it works in tandem with a long series of rhymes, like the shed / sped / pled / bread sequence that opens the poem.) One deviation from this pattern comes in lines 21-22:
And give us the life of the moving-pictures' promise
That the party in power is said to be keeping from us.
The falling unstressed syllables at the end of these two lines support the country people's rather sour, crestfallen tone as they describe what they hope they might get out of a few handfuls of city cash.
While "A Roadside Stand" doesn't stick to a regular rhyme scheme, it does use plenty of rhyme, and often in surprising and distinctive ways. The poem's first four lines, for instance, run like this:
[...] shed [A]
[...] sped, [A]
[...] pled, [A]
[...] bread, [A]
Those four A rhymes in a row (all landing on a strong stressed syllable, too) feel blunt and abrupt, maybe even a little clumsy. They thus suit the unassuming, ramshackle "roadside stand" they describe, with its "signs [...] with N turned wrong and S turned wrong."
Across the rest of the poem, Frost uses meandering and unpredictable patterns of rhyme. Sometimes he'll leave a rhyme word hanging for long intervals—as in the link between faint in line 6, paint in line 9, and complaint in line 16. And sometimes, he'll insert some punchy rhymed couplets (like the hand / expand and promise / from us sequence in lines 19-22).
The rhymes, in other words, are hard to get a grip on. The poem's lurching, evasive rhymes work with the poem's tone of dismay, matching the frustrated speaker's lack of good ideas about how to resolve the suffering and confusion they observe in rural America.
The poem's speaker looks with sympathy upon the people who live in the countryside and run their desperate "roadside stand"—but they don't seem to count themselves among this population. Yet the speaker doesn't exactly seem to be an urban person, either: they look with disdain upon the people who live in the city, drive gleaming cars, and scorn the roadside stand. This speaker stands apart from both the worlds they criticize. Perhaps they've lived in both.
They certainly seem to be on more intimate and sympathetic terms with rural folks than urban, seeing their way of life as more honest and less shallow than the lives of those who "live in villages, next to the theatre and the store" and don't "think for themselves." However, they also view the rural population with some condescension, observing that the farmers' wistful desire for "city money" is just a "childish longing" and even briefly admitting that they'd feel "great relief" at "put[ting] these people at one stroke out of their pain." That doesn't last long; a moment later, they're asking themselves how they would feel if someone offered to euthanize them. But it's a revealing, complex flash of horror, pity, and disgust. Perhaps the clearest thing readers can gather about this speaker, then, is that they're a person with a dim view of the whole modern world, from the poverty-stricken proprietors of the roadside stand to the inconsiderate drivers who pass them by.
"A Roadside Stand" is set in an unidentified American rural area, a "beautiful mountain scene" whose people are nevertheless impoverished and desperate. Frost never identifies where exactly this spot is; he only contrasts it with the gleaming city, where people live next door to "the theatre and the store," enjoying a glossier but more complacent way of life. (Readers familiar with Frost's work, however, might guess that the poem takes place somewhere in New England, the scene of most of his poetry.)
This scenario feels of a time as much as a place. Frost published this poem in 1936, right in the heart of the Great Depression—a time when desperate American farmers were indeed giving up and relocating to cities, hoping for more work and better lives. The poem's speaker has pained, conflicted feelings about the countryside. Country people, they observe, live by "ancient way[s]," working for sustenance rather than for the flashy rewards of gleaming cars and fancy lifestyles—and, in the speaker's opinion, they "think for themselves," in contrast to the urbanites seduced by convenience, glamor, and cash. But these country people, the speaker notes, also want what the urbanites have, with a "childish longing" that fills them with "trusting sorrow." In other words, they don't know the value of the kinds of lives they lead, and they feel betrayed and abandoned by a world that values the "moving-pictures' promise" (that is, Hollywood illusions about how life should be) above all.
"A Roadside Stand" was first collected in A Further Range (1936), the book that won American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) his third of four Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry.
Though widely read and much honored during his lifetime, Frost was often received as a quaint, folksy writer: a kind of backwoods New England sage. In 1958, the famous literary critic Lionel Trilling helped change this perception when he called the elderly Frost "a terrifying poet." Though Frost remained steadfastly traditional in his use of meter and rhyme, he displayed a very modern skepticism—sometimes even a chilling pessimism—in poems like "Desert Places," "Design," "The Most of It," and indeed "A Roadside Stand." Many of Frost's poems, including "Desert Places" and the famous "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," feature solitary characters, rural settings, and explorations of the relationship between humanity and nature.
Robert Frost wrote during the modernist period of the early 20th century. While his work contains some modernist traits, Frost often stuck to familiar rhythms and meters in ways that other modernists (like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) usually did not. Like the modernists, however, he embraced and experimented with conversational diction: he often wrote in New England dialect.
Despite Frost's use of some features of modernism, he never aligned himself with any particular school of writing. He was known for his unique style and his willingness to draw on a variety of poetic traditions. In particular, his focus on the natural world connects his work to an earlier generation of New England writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson.
Though he lived through World Wars I and II and saw many significant social and political shifts in his lifetime, Frost hardly ever wrote directly about history or politics. Instead, Frost's poetry is known for dealing with rural New England life and identity. Frost lived and worked on a New Hampshire farm from 1900 to 1912, and his poetry's focus on rural life, nature, and New England reflects his experiences.
This poem, however, is an exception. Its remarks on "greedy good-doers" trying to "soothe [farmers] out of their wits" might be read as Frost's response to governmental attempts to relieve poverty during the Great Depression. During this worldwide economic catastrophe, American farmers came under strain from tough financial conditions and tough weather alike. As this poem's speaker observes, many farmers were forced or coaxed to leave their land and their traditional lives and move to cities to find work. Frost here laments the loss of rural rootedness as desperate farmers go in search of "city money." He also casts a wary eye over a government that "enforc[es] benefits" on its people—in this case, an urban government that takes too heavy-handed an approach to "improving" rural people's lives according to its own standards.
A Brief Biography — Learn more about Frost's life and work.
Frost's Home — Visit the website of the Robert Frost Farm, a museum housed in one of Frost's former homes, to learn more about the poet's life.
The Great Depression — Learn more about the Great Depression, the massive economic crisis that was in full swing when Frost published "A Roadside Stand" in 1936.
An Interview with Frost — Listen to a recorded conversation between Frost and his fellow poet Randall Jerell.