In Meeting and Passing, Frost stages a relationship in the space of a pause on a dusty hill. A speaker walking down past a wall and gate meets someone coming up; they talk; the other smiles at something in the dust; then each continues into the path the other has just left. There is no touch beyond footprints, no declaration. Yet the poem turns that minimal encounter into a meditation on what it means to stand between solitude and union. The central idea lies in the “figure” the two walkers leave: their mingled footprints suggest a being “less than two / But more than one as yet.” It is a relationship not completed, but suspended in shared possibility.
Frost gives that suspension a sonnet’s shape. The fourteen lines move mostly in iambic pentameter, and the octave’s rhyme pattern—ABBA ABBA—sets up a sense of approach and return, as if the rhyme itself walks down one side of the hill and back around. The early full stop at “We met. But all” is a hinge: the event is over almost as soon as it happens, and the next line turns from meeting to meaning. In the sestet the rhymes shift to CDCD before the final couplet, and that couplet falls on the word “passed” twice, so the poem’s closing sound doubles back on itself rather than resolving into a new rhyme. The form, like the meeting, stays in a state of quiet exchange.
The poem’s imagery is small but precise: a wall, a gate, a view, summer dust. The dust matters because it records the pair without naming them. Their footprints “mingle great and small,” one larger and one smaller, as if they “drew / The figure of our being.” Footprints are negative images—they preserve direction and pressure, not identity. That is exactly right for two people who are not yet a couple. Then the other walker’s parasol makes the day’s decisive mark: it “Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.” The prim object becomes a punctuation mark, and the two walkers’ mingled traces become a number somewhere between one and two. Arithmetic enters a scene of potential romance, but Frost uses it tenderly: the point does not divide them; it places them on a scale of becoming.
Even so, uncertainty runs beneath the calm surface. The speaker notices that, while they talked, the other “seemed to see / Something down there to smile at in the dust,” and immediately adds in parentheses, “(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)” That legal phrase is surprisingly formal for a hillside. It tries to fix the meaning of a smile, to insist it was not aimed as a criticism. The parenthesis makes the line feel like an aside, half to the reader and half to himself. The speaker wants the meeting not to have left him foolish.
The closing couplet resolves that anxiety through reciprocity. After they part, “Afterward I went past what you had passed / Before we met and you what I had passed.” The reversal is exact: I move into your before, you into mine. Because “passed” rings against “passed,” the ending becomes an echo from the other side of the hill. The two do not merge into one, but they are no longer simply two. Frost’s achievement is to make that arithmetic felt—to find a gate, a parasol, and a few footprints in dust enough machinery for a small, suspended, strangely significant meeting.