False helpers and the poet's pain

Then Frost turns to the news. It is said that these poor people will be 'bought out' and moved into villages next to the theatre and the store, where they will not have to think for themselves.

Frost is angry at the people behind such plans. He calls them 'greedy good-doers' and 'beneficent beasts of prey': they claim to help, but their 'help' really takes away the poor people's land and independence, and they profit from it. They will teach them to sleep all day and destroy their sleep at night with their ways.

The poet confesses his own pain. Sometimes he can hardly bear the thought of so much hopeless, childlike longing in vain, a sadness that is there but never spoken.

He even thinks it would be a relief to put these people out of their pain at one stroke. But then he catches himself, and asks how he would feel if someone came to him and offered to end his pain in the same way. The thought is uncomfortable, and that is the point: we have no right to decide others' lives for them.

The poem's rhyme is irregular: Frost cares more about the thought than the sound. Its message is that villages and cities must grow together; the rural poor deserve real support and respect, not pity or false help.