Robert Frost-American Poet

The Wood Pile.





Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray dayI paused and said,

'I will turn back from here.No, I will go on farther- and we shall see'.

The hard snow held me, save where now and then

One foot went through.

The view was all in lines

Straight up and down of tail slim trees

Too much alike to mark or name a place by

So as to say for certain I was here

Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

A small bird flew before me.

He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather-

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself.

ne flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

And then there was a pile of wood for whichI forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled- and measured, four by four by eight.And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.

And it was older sure than this year's cutting,

Or even last year's or the year's before.

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it

And the pile somewhat sunken.

ClematisHad wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

What held it though on one side was a treeStill growing, and on one a stake and prop,These latter about to fall.

I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself the labor of his axe,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

Robert Frost-American Poet

West running Brook.



'Fred, where is north?''North?
North is there, my love.
The brook runs west.
''West-running Brook then call it.
'(West-Running Brook men call it to this day.)
'What does it think k's doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow eastTo reach the ocean?
It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you -- and you with me --Because we're -- we're -- I don't know what we are.
What are we?
''Young or new?''
We must be something.
We've said we two.
Let's change that to we three.
As you and I are married to each other,
We'll both be married to the brook.
We'll buildOur bridge across it,
and the bridge shall beOur arm thrown over it asleep beside it.
Look, look, it's waving to us with a waveTo let us know it hears me.
'' 'Why, my dear,That wave's been standing off this jut of shore --'(The black stream, catching a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing, like a birdWhite feathers from the struggle of whose breastFlecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool
Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkledIn a white scarf against the far shore alders.)
'That wave's been standing off this jut of shoreEver since rivers,
I was going to say,
'Were made in heaven.
It wasn't waved to us.
''It wasn't, yet it was. If not to youIt was to me -- in an annunciation.'
'Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,As't were the country of the Amazons
We men must see you to the confines of
And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,-It is your brook!
I have no more to say.
''Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something.
''Speaking of contraries, see how the brookIn that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were fromLong, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.Some say existence like a Pirouot
And Pirouette, forever in one place,
Stands still and dances, but it runs away,It seriously, sadly, runs away
To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us.
It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.
It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life and love-And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death
That spends to nothingness -- and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
It has this throwing backward on itself
So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.''To-day will be the day....
You said so.''No, to-day will be the dayYou said the brook was called West-running Brook.
''To-day will be the day of what we both said.'

Robert Frost-American Poet

Tree at my Window


Tree at my window,
window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawnBetween you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground
,And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloudCould be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
ou have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

Robert Frost-American Poet

The Hill wife


One ought not to have to care

So much as you and I

Care when the birds come round the house

To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back

With whatever it is they sing;

The truth being we are as much

Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here --

With birds that fill their breastsBut with each other and themselves

And their built or driven nests.

HOUSE FEARAlways -- I tell you this they learned--

Always at night when they returned

To the lonely house from far away

To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,

They learned to rattle the lock and key

To give whatever might chance to be

Warning and time to be off in flight:

And preferring the out- to the in-door night,

They. learned to leave the house-door wide

Until they had lit the lamp inside.

THE SMILE(Her Word)I didn't like the way he went away.

That smile! It never came of being gay.

Still he smiled- did you see him?- I was sure!

Perhaps because we gave him only bread

And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.

Perhaps because he let us give insteadOf seizing from us as he might have seized.

Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,

Or being very young (and he was pleasedTo have a vision of us old and dead).

I wonder how far down the road he's got.

He's watching from the woods as like as not.

THE OFT-REPEATED DREAMShe had no saying dark enough

For the dark pine that kept

Forever trying the window-latchOf the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands

That with every futile pass

Made the great tree seem as a little bird

Before the mystery of glass!It never had been inside the room,

And only one of the two

Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream

Of what the tree might do.THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,And too wild,And since there were but two of them,

And no child,

And work was little in the house,

She was free,And followed where he furrowed field,

Or felled tree.She rested on a log and tossed

The fresh chips,With a song only to herselfOn her lips.

And once she went to break a boughOf black alder.

She strayed so far she scarcely heard.

When he called her--

And didn't answer -- didn't speak --

Or return.

he stood, and then she ran and hidIn the fern.

He never found her, though he lookedEverywhere,

And he asked at her mother's house

Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that

The ties gave,

And he learned of finalities

Besides the grave.

Robert Frost-American Poet

Storm Fear


When the wind works against us in the dark,

And pelts with snow

The lowest chamber window on the east,

And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,

The beast, 'Come out! Come out!'--

It costs no inward struggle not to go,

Ah, no! I count our strength,

Two and a child,

Those of us not asleep subdued to mark

How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,

-- How drifts are piled,

Dooryard and road ungraded,

Till even the comforting barn grows far away

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether 'tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.

Robert Frost-American Poet

The Mountain

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,
Where its black body cut into the sky.

Near me it seemed:
I felt it like a wallBehind which I was sheltered from a wind.
And yet between the town and it I found,
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.
The river at the time was fallen away,
And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grassRidges of sand,
and driftwood stripped of bark.
I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
And there I met a man who moved so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no harm to stop him altogether.
'What town is this?' I asked.
'This? Lunenburg.
'Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge,
was not that of the mountain,
But only felt at night its shadowy presence.'
Where is your village? Very far from here?
''There is no village- only scattered farms.
We were but sixty voters last election.
We can't in nature grow to many more:That fling takes all the room!'
He moved his goad.
The mountain stood there to be pointed at.
Pasture ran up the side a little way,
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks:
After that only tops of trees,
and cliffsImperfectly concealed among the leaves.
A dry ravine emerged from under boughsInto the pasture.'
That looks like a path.Is that the way to reach the top from here? --
Not for this morning,
but some other time:I must be getting back to breakfast now.
''I don't advise your trying from this side.
There is no proper path,
but those that haveBeen up,
I understand, have climbed from Ladd's.
That's five miles back.
You can't mistake the place:They logged it there last winter some way up.
I'd take you, but I'm bound the other way.
''You've never climbed it?
''I've been on the sidesDeer-hunting and trout-fishing.
There's a brook
That starts up on it somewhere -- I've heard sayRight on the top, tip-top -- a curious thing.
But what would interest you about the brook,It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.One of the great sights going is to seeIt steam in winter like an ox's breath.Until the bushes all along its banksAre inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles --You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it !''There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain -- if it isn't woodedClear to the top.
' I saw through leafy screensGreat granite terraces in sun and shadow,
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up --With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;
Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow.
'As to that I can't say.
But there's the spring,Right on the summit,
almost like a fountain.
That ought to be worth seeing.
''If it's there....You never saw it?
''I guess there's no doubtAbout its being there.
I never saw it.It may not be right on the very top:
It wouldn't have to be a long way down
To have some head of water from above,
And a good distance down might not be noticed
By anyone who'd come a long way up.
One time I asked a fellow climbing itTo look and tell me later how it was.
''What did he say?''
He said there was a lakeSomewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.
''But a lake's different. What about the spring?'
'He never got up high enough to see.That's why I don't advise your trying this side.He tried this side. I've always meant to goAnd look myself, but you know how it is:It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountainYou've worked around the foot of all your life.What would I do? Go in my overalls,With a big stick, the same as when the cowsHaven't come down to the bars at milking time?Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
'Twouldn't seem real to climb for climbing it.
''I shouldn't climb it if I didn't want to-v Not for the sake of climbing.
What's its name?''
We call it Hor: I don't know if that's right.
''Can one walk round it? Would it be too far?''
You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,
But it's as much as ever you can do,
The boundary lines keep in so close to it.
Hor is the township, and the township's Hor-And a few houses sprinkled round the foot,Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
Rolled out a little farther than the rest.''Warm in December, cold in June, you say?''I don't suppose the water's changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it's warmCompared with cold,
and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun's in how you say a thing.
''You've lived here all your life?
''Ever since HorWas no bigger than a --' What, I did not hear.
He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders, and was moving.

Robert Frost-American Poet

The Cow in Apple Time.

Something inspires the only cow of late

To make no more of a wall than an open gate,

And think no more of wall-builders than fools.

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup.

Having tasted fruit,

She scorns a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.

She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.

She bellows on a knoll against the sky.

Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.