A single cow, a broken wall, and a mouthful of windfall apples—Frost builds a small parable from these rural props. His eleven lines move in a loose iambic pentameter, the rhymes mostly pairing into couplets before the final three strokes of “fly,” “sky,” “dry,” so the verse sounds conversational yet tightly braced. The poem opens not with a dramatic escape but with a change in perception: “Something inspires the only cow of late / To make no more of a wall than an open gate.” That word “inspires” is crucial. It suggests breath, spirit, sudden influence, yet its source is never named. The cow does not merely wander through a gap; she redefines the wall entirely. Once a barrier, it becomes an invitation. The wall-builders, meanwhile, shrink in her eyes to “fools.” Frost begins with a comic overturning of order: one animal’s appetite becomes a philosophy that dismisses fences as irrelevant.
The comedy thickens in the next lines. The cow’s face is “flecked with pomace and she drools / A cider syrup.” “Pomace”—the crushed pulp left after pressing apples—belongs to the cider mill more than the pasture, and the detail makes clear that she has been feeding on fermented windfalls. The syrupy drool is both vivid and undignified. Having “tasted fruit,” she “scorns a pasture withering to the root.” The line carries an echo of forbidden fruit, but Frost keeps the reference earthy. The pasture is not just ordinary grass; it is withering, and her scorn for it is as sudden and total as her contempt for the wall. The poem tracks a shift from nourishment by discipline to intoxication by sweetness.
The middle of the poem follows the cow’s restless movement: “She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten / The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.” Here the windfalls are anything but perfect. They are bruised, stubbled, worm-eaten, even rotting. Yet they “sweeten” as they decay, and that is exactly what draws her. Frost does not romanticize the fruit; he shows appetite choosing damaged, overripe things precisely because they are potent. The cow “leaves them bitten when she has to fly,” never settling, never fully satisfied. Her brief pause on a knoll—“She bellows on a knoll against the sky”—turns her into a lonely silhouette. The verb “bellows” is deliberately unlovely; she does not low, she roars as if in protest or confusion.
That final line is the poem’s blunt reckoning: “Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.” The rhyme tightens the ending: after all the running and bellowing, the cow’s purpose as a milk-producing animal is gone. Freedom, appetite, and intoxication have cost her the very thing she was kept for. Frost does not moralize; he simply states the physical consequence. Yet the poem feels significant beyond the barnyard because it lays bare a pattern of desire: a taste of something sweeter can make ordinary sustenance seem worthless, and the pursuit of that sweetness may leave a creature both wilder and emptied. The cow’s escape is real, but so is the drying up.