Pauls Wife
To drive Paul out of any lumber camp
All that was needed was to say to him,
"How is the wife, Paul?"--and he'd disappear.
Some said it was because be bad no wife,
And hated to be twitted on the subject;
Others because he'd come within a day
Or so of having one, and then been Jilted;
Others because he'd had one once, a good one,
Who'd run away with someone else and left him;
And others still because he had one now
He only had to be reminded of--
He was all duty to her in a minute:
He had to run right off to look her up,
As if to say, "That's so, how is my wife?
I hope she isn't getting into mischief."
No one was anxious to get rid of Paul.
He'd been the hero of the mountain camps
Ever since, just to show them, he bad slipped
The bark of a whole tamarack off whole
As clean as boys do off a willow twig
To make a willow whistle on a Sunday
April by subsiding meadow brooks.
They seemed to ask him just to see him go,
"How is the wife, Paul?" and he always went.
He never stopped to murder anyone
Who asked the question. He just disappeared--
Nobody knew in what direction,
Although it wasn't usually long
Before they beard of him in some new camp,
The same Paul at the same old feats of logging.
The question everywhere was why should Paul
Object to being asked a civil question--
A man you could say almost anything to
Short of a fighting word. You have the answers.
And there was one more not so fair to Paul:
That Paul had married a wife not his equal.
Paul was ashamed of her. To match a hero
She would have had to be a heroine;
Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw.
But if the story Murphy told was true,
She wasn't anything to be ashamed of.
You know Paul could do wonders. Everyone's
Heard how he thrashed the horses on a load
That wouldn't budge, until they simply stretched
Their rawhide harness from the load to camp.
Paul told the boss the load would be all right,
"The sun will bring your load in"--and it did--
By shrinking the rawhide to natural length.
That's what is called a stretcher. But I guess
The one about his jumping so's to land
With both his feet at once against the ceiling,
And then land safely right side up again,
Back on the floor, is fact or pretty near fact.
Well, this is such a yarn. Paul sawed his wife
Out of a white-pine log. Murphy was there
And, as you might say, saw the lady born.
Paul worked at anything in lumbering.
He'd been bard at it taking boards away
For--I forget--the last ambitious sawyer
To want to find out if he couldn't pile
The lumber on Paul till Paul begged for mercy.
They'd sliced the first slab off a big butt log,
And the sawyer had slammed the carriage back
To slam end-on again against the saw teeth.
To judge them by the way they caught themselves
When they saw what had happened to the log,
They must have had a guilty expectation
Something was going to go with their slambanging.
Something bad left a broad black streak of grease
On the new wood the whole length of the log
Except, perhaps, a foot at either end.
But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn't grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
"First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to bell for me," the sawyer said.
Everyone had to have a look at it
And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.
(They treated it as his.) "You take a jackknife,
And spread the opening, and you've got a dugout
All dug to go a-fishing in." To Paul
The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty
Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees.
There was no entrance for them to get in by.
It looked to him like some new kind of hollow
He thought he'd better take his jackknife to.
So after work that evening be came back
And let enough light into it by cutting
To see if it was empty. He made out in there
A slender length of pith, or was it pith?
It might have been the skin a snake had cast
And left stood up on end inside the tree
The hundred years the tree must have been growing.
More cutting and he bad this in both hands,
And looking from it to the pond nearby,
Paul wondered how it would respond to water.
Not a breeze stirred, but just the breath of air
He made in walking slowly to the beach
Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it.
He laid it at the edge, where it could drink.
At the first drink it rustled and grew limp.
At the next drink it grew invisible.
Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers,
And thought it must have melted. It was gone.
And then beyond the open water, dim with midges,
Where the log drive lay pressed against the boom,
It slowly rose a person, rose a girl,
Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet,
Who, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul.
And that made Paul in turn look back
To see if it was anyone behind him
That she was looking at instead of him.
(Murphy had been there watching all the time,
But from a shed where neither of them could see him.)
There was a moment of suspense in birth
When the girl seemed too waterlogged to live,
Before she caught her first breath with a gasp
And laughed. Then she climbed slowly to her feet,
And walked off, talking to herself or Paul,
Across the logs like backs of alligators,
Paul taking after her around the pond.
Next evening Murphy and some other fellows
Got drunk, and tracked the pair up Catamount,
From the bare top of which there is a view
TO other hills across a kettle valley.
And there, well after dark, let Murphy tell it,
They saw Paul and his creature keeping house.
It was the only glimpse that anyone
Has had of Paul and her since Murphy saw them
Falling in love across the twilight millpond.
More than a mile across the wilderness
They sat together halfway up a cliff
In a small niche let into it, the girl
Brightly, as if a star played on the place,
Paul darkly, like her shadow. All the light
Was from the girl herself, though, not from a star,
As was apparent from what happened next.
All those great ruffians put their throats together,
And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle,
As a brute tribute of respect to beauty.
Of course the bottle fell short by a mile,
But the shout reached the girl and put her light out.
She went out like a firefly, and that was all.
So there were witnesses that Paul was married
And not to anyone to be ashamed of
Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.
Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs
About his wife to keep her to himself.
Paul was what's called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn't anybody else's business,
Either to praise her or much as name her,
And he'd thank people not to think of her.
Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.
Literary Analysis
This literary analysis was generated with AI and may contain interpretive differences. Provide your analysis in the comments section.
Summary
Robert Frost presents a campfire tale that begins as a joke at the expense of Paul, a lumberjack who vanishes whenever anyone asks about his wife. At first, the men in the camps assume he is touchy, unlucky, embarrassed, or otherwise ruled by some private grievance. The poem steadily widens that mystery until the wife becomes less a domestic detail than a hidden center of Paul's life, something so intimate and so fiercely guarded that even a casual question feels like trespass.
The story then turns toward legend. Through Murphy's account, Paul's wife appears to have been literally made from the life of a hollow pine, a figure of beauty and fragility that Paul discovers, protects, and loses the moment rough male attention reaches her. The ending shifts the whole poem's meaning: Paul is not merely odd or ashamed, but possessive in a way the other men cannot fully comprehend. Frost leaves the reader balancing humor, myth, tenderness, and unease, as the poem asks whether Paul's secrecy is absurd, loving, controlling, or all three at once.
Form Breakdown
Theme
- Privacy and secrecy - Paul's refusal to discuss his wife turns private life into a guarded territory, and the repeated question from the camp becomes an intrusion rather than harmless small talk.
- Possession and love - The final explanation suggests that Paul loves by keeping his wife to himself, but the poem leaves that devotion tangled with possessiveness and control.
- Masculine community and teasing - The lumber camp culture depends on banter, pressure, and shared roughness, yet Paul's reaction shows that even ordinary teasing can expose a deep vulnerability.
- Myth and storytelling - The poem grows from gossip into tall tale, using exaggeration and rumor to make Paul's wife seem both magical and emotionally true.
- Beauty and fragility - Paul's wife is imagined as luminous and delicate, easily extinguished by the crude attention of the men who cannot handle what they admire.
- Misjudgment - The men keep inventing reasons for Paul's behavior, and the poem gradually shows how easily a community can mistake silence for shame or eccentricity.
- Human intimacy versus public speech - The poem suggests that some relationships cannot be translated into casual talk without losing their meaning or dignity.
Literary Devices
- Frame narrative - The poem is built as a reported story told by one man to others, which creates distance while also letting the tale accumulate authority through repeated retelling.
- Hyperbole - Paul's feats, his sudden disappearances, and the miraculous wife all belong to the tradition of the tall tale, enlarging ordinary lumber camp life into legend.
- Simile - Frost uses comparisons such as Paul's dark presence beside his wife and the wife's disappearance like a firefly to sharpen contrast and make the images memorable.
- Irony - What seems at first like a harmless question becomes the one thing Paul cannot bear, and the men's confidence in their own explanations is steadily undercut.
- Symbolism - The hollow pine, the millpond, and the brief light of the wife all carry meanings beyond the literal story, pointing to hidden life, emergence, and loss.
- Colloquial diction - The conversational language of the camps gives the poem its comic texture and roots the fanciful tale in a working-class oral tradition.
- Repetition - The recurring question about Paul's wife mimics the persistence of gossip and shows how the men keep testing the same private boundary.
- Contrast - Frost sets rough logging culture against the wife's radiance, creating a strong divide between brute public life and delicate personal attachment.
Symbolism
- The wife - She stands for private love, beauty, and the part of life that cannot survive public handling.
- The hollow pine - The tree suggests concealed life and the mysterious making of something human out of hidden natural substance.
- The millpond - The pond becomes the place where love appears, transforms, and is vulnerable to the gaze of others.
- Light - The wife's light suggests vitality and individuality, and its extinguishing marks how quickly wonder can be lost.
- The logging camp - The camp represents a social world of masculine testing, rough humor, and relentless scrutiny.
- Paul's disappearance - His vanishing acts symbolize refusal, self-protection, and the power of a private bond to interrupt public life.
Tone
Frost's tone is wry, knowing, and quietly amused, especially as he lets the camp's gossip and explanations pile up before revealing that none of them fully capture Paul. Beneath the humor, though, the mood grows increasingly enchanted and unsettling: the wife's appearance feels miraculous, and her sudden extinguishing gives the poem a hush of loss. The result is a blend of frontier comedy, folk legend, and emotional unease.
Historical Context
Robert Frost often drew on rural New England settings, spoken rhythms, and folktale-like storytelling, even when his poems moved into fantasy or exaggeration. This poem fits that larger pattern by using the world of logging camps to frame a tall tale about privacy, labor, and human attachment. Its plainspoken surface reflects Frost's interest in everyday speech, while its imaginative turn belongs to the long tradition of American frontier yarns.
The poem also belongs to a literary culture that often treated lumber camps, woodsmen, and northern labor as sites of masculine competition and oral storytelling. Frost uses that setting not simply for realism, but to explore how communities talk about one another, how rumor becomes narrative, and how private relationships can be flattened by public joking.