The best way out is always through.

“A Servant to Servants” is a monologue spoken by a farmer’s wife who lives by Lake Willoughby, in Vermont, to a visitor who heard of the place “In a book about ferns”. She tells of cooking for hungry hired men and doing “Things over and over that just won’t stay done”. It is rest she wants, not medicine. Her husband Len, who “looks on the bright side of everything”, says one steady pull more ought to do it.

The line is Len’s saying, reported by his wife. She agrees, but only “in so far / As that I can see no way out but through”. Later she admits that she has already spent time in the State Asylum, and that madness runs in her family. The title says it all: she serves the hired men.

Frost published the poem in North of Boston, which appeared in London in 1914, while he was living in England. Out of context, the line has become a motto of perseverance; in the poem, it rings far darker.

A Servant to Servants (North of Boston), 1914

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work