Although Frost's first volume is consistently taken to be a random collection of lyrics, this does not square with the poet's remarks about it. In both private and public writings, Frost indicated that the lyrics were selected and arranged into a narrative sequence tracing the development of a youth through what he at one point summarized as a “Phase of Post-adolescence.” The lyrics follow the youth from initial, immature withdrawal from society, to final, mature acceptance of himself both as an individual and as a budding poet. But this narrative intent is recognizable only when the first edition of A Boy's Will is examined, because Frost made significant changes in later versions. For a variety of reasons, the first edition does not esthetically satisfy as a narrative cycle. Nevertheless, showing in detail how Frost sought to impose a narrative frame on the lyrics is significant in two ways. It makes it possible to suggest, in the course of the discussion, readings of individual poems which differ from those which the poet himself, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, later endorsed. In the larger context, it provides insight into the position of the thirty-eight-year-old poet at the beginning of his public career; A Boy's Will emerges at once as Frost's retrospective look at what he had been, and a harbinger of what he would become.