Poems by Robert Lee FrostHe halted in the wind, and--what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
The firm house lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear A number in.
But what about the brook
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;
And to the forest edge you came one day
To think to know the country and now know
The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!
Lancaster bore him--such a little town,
Such a great man. It doesn't see him often
The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift.
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
I have wished a bird would fly away,
And not sing by my house all day;
Have clapped my hands at him from the door
To Ridgely Torrence
On Last Looking into His 'Hesperides'
I often see flowers from a passing car
There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.
Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her
And draws it down as if it were a lover
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
Here further up the mountain slope
Than there was every any hope,
My father built, enclosed a spring,
We chanced in passing by that afternoon
To catch it in a sort of special picture
Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,
It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
"You ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:
Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about--
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
The great Overdog
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye
Gives a leap in the east.
He dances upright
As far as I can see this autumn haze
That spreading in the evening air both way,
Makes the new moon look anything but new,
There were three in the meadow by the brook
Gathering up windrows, piling cocks of hay,
Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
It was far in the sameness of the wood;
I was running with joy on the Demon's trail,
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean--
Holding the curve of one position,
In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes
Will keep my talk from getting overwise,
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
From where I lingered in a lull in march
outside the sugar-house one night for choice,
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
A lantern light from deeper in the barn
Shone on a man and woman in the door
And threw their lurching shadows on a house
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
Blood has been harder to dam back than water.
Just when we think we have it impounded safe
The Fisherman's swapping a yarn for a yarn
Under the hand of the village barber,
And here in the angle of house and barn
I left you in the morning,
And in the morning glow,
You walked a way beside me
To make me sad to go.
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
A governor it was proclaimed this time,
When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire
I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
The well was dry beside the door,
And so we went with pail and can
Across the fields behind the house
I had for my winter evening walk--
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.
There overtook me and drew me in
To his down-hill, early-morning stride,
And set me five miles on my road
Was there even a cause too lost,
Ever a cause that was lost too long,
Or that showed with the lapse of time to vain
LONELINESS
(Her Word)
One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him.She was starting down,
I let myself in at the kitchen door.
"It's you," she said. "I can't get up. Forgive me
Not answering your knock. I can no more
By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
It was long I lay
Awake that night
Wishing that night
Would name the hour
And tell me whether
To call it day
No ship of all that under sail or steam
Have gathered people to us more and more
But Pilgrim-manned the Mayflower in a dream
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
They leave us so to the way we took,
As two in whom them were proved mistaken,
That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Over back where they speak of life as staying
('You couldn't call it living, for it ain't'),
Seek not in me the bit I capital,
Not yet the little dotted in me seek.
If I have in me any I at all,
Builder, in building the little house,
In every way you may please yourself;
But please please me in the kitchen chimney:
There's a place called Far-away Meadow
We never shall mow in again,
Or such is the talk at the farmhouse:
Here come the line-gang pioneering by,
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.
I blew out the light,
The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
A stranger came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
All crying, 'We will go with you, O Wind!'
The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;
But a sleep oppresses them as they go,
The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun-assaulter, he
That frightened thee so oft, is fled or dead:
My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
They sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying? And she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
(To hear us talk)
The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not bar
As vain to raise a voice as a sigh
In the tumult of free leaves on high.
What are you in the shadow of trees
You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
Always the same, when on a fated night
At last the gathered snow lets down as white
As may be in dark woods, and with a song
It snowed in spring on earth so dry and warm
The flakes could find no landing place to form.
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
Pan came out of the woods one day,--
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,--
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
If heaven were to do again,
And on the pasture bars,
I leaned to line the figures in
Between the dotted starts,
Nothing to say to all those marriages!
She had made three herself to three of his.
The score was even for them, three to three.
I hear men say to plow the snow.
They cannot mean to plant it, though?
Unless in bitterness to mock
At having cultivated rock.
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper's on the table, and we'll see
If I can leave off burying the white
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated hear
The surest thing there is is we are riders,
And though none too successful at it, guiders,
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But now the theory goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
A saturated meadow,
Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
Than the trees around were tall;
Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, ?Whose colt??
Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die,
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.
"Willis, I didn't want you here to-day:
The lawyer's coming for the company.
I'm going to sell my soul, or, rather, feet.
When I spread out my hand here today,
I catch no more than a ray
To feel of between thumb and fingers;
I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
You know Orien always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
How countlessly they congregate
O'er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!--
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
'When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head again a flower
Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
The bearer of evil tidings,
When he was halfway there,
Remembered that evil tidings
Were a dangerous thing to bear.
He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But now the theory goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
I WONDER about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
More than halfway up the pass
Was a spring with a broken drinking glass,
And whether the farmer drank or not
Here's first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket,
A perch and resting place 'twixt wood and wood,
I slumbered with your poems on my breast
Spread open as I dropped them half-read through
Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb
The sound of the closing outside door was all.
You made no sound in the grass with your footfall,
He is said to have been the last Red man
In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed--
If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me--in the dawn,
To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
When I was young my teachers were the old.
I gave up fire for form till I was cold.
I suffered like a metal being cast.
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day
I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.
