In “A Brook in the City,” Frost’s speaker notices a farmhouse that has been awkwardly absorbed into a city street and then asks what became of the brook that once bent around it like an elbow. He remembers it as a living force—he could make it leap over his finger and test its currents with a flower. Now the grass is paved over and the apple trees burned, but the brook was not destroyed; it was buried alive in a sewer, running in fetid darkness.
The speaker’s tone is elegiac and quietly disturbed. The brook survives as a hidden, almost vengeful presence, and the final lines suggest that something suppressed in this way may return as unease, troubling the new city’s work and sleep.