The Giant Book of Poetry (2006)
Page 27
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
on the side hill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
but the child’s mound—’
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,’ she cried.
She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm
that rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;
and turned on him with such a daunting look,
he said twice over before he knew himself:
‘can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?’
‘Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it!
I must get out of here. I must get air.
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.’
‘Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.
Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.’
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
‘There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.’
‘You don’t know how to ask it.’
‘Help me, then.’
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.
‘My words are nearly always an offense.
I don’t know how to speak of anything
so as to please you. But I might be taught
I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
with women-folk. We could have some arrangement
by which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
anything special you’re a-mind to name.
Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.
Two that don’t love can’t live together without them.
But two that do can’t live together with them.’
She moved the latch a little. ’Don’t—don’t go.
Don’t carry it to someone else this time.
Tell me about it if it’s something human.
Let me into your grief. I’m not so much
unlike other folks as your standing there
apart would make me out. Give me my chance.
I do think, though, you overdo it a little.
What was it brought you up to think it the thing
to take your mother—loss of a first child
so inconsolably—in the face of love.
You’d think his memory might be satisfied—’
‘There you go sneering now!’
‘I’m not, I’m not!
You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.
God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,
a man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.’
‘You can’t because you don’t know how to speak.
If you had any feelings, you that dug
with your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
making the gravel leap and leap in air,
leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
and roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
to look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice
out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
but I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
and talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
outside there in the entry, for I saw it.’
‘I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.’
‘I can repeat the very words you were saying.
“Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
to do with what was in the darkened parlor.
You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
with anyone to death, comes so far short
they might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death,
one is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretense of following to the grave,
but before one is in it, their minds are turned
and making the best of their way back to life
and living people, and things they understand.
But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so
if I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!’
‘There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.
The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.
Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!’
‘You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—
somewhere out of this house. How can I make you—’
‘if—you—do! ’She was opening the door wider.
‘Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—’
In a Disused Graveyard1
The living come with grassy tread
to read the gravestones on the hill;
the graveyard draws the living still,
but never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“the ones who living come today
to read the stones and go away
tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
yet can’t help marking all the time
how no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
and tell the stones: Men hate to die
and have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
Into My Own2
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
but stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
into their vastness I should steal away,
fearless of ever finding open land,
or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
or those should not set forth upon my track
to overtake me, who should miss me here
and long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
only more sure of all I thought was true.
Mending Wall1
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
that sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
and spills the upper boulders in the sun;
and makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
where they have left not one stone on a stone,
but they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
to please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
no one has seen them made or heard them made,
but at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
and on a day we meet to walk the line
and set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fal
len to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
we have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
one on a side. It comes to little more:
there where it is we do not need the wall:
he is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
and eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ’Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
if I could put a notion in his head:
‘why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
what I was walling in or walling out,
and to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
that wants it down. ’I could say ’Elves’ to him,
but it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
he said it for himself. I see him there
bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
in each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
and he likes having thought of it so well
he says again, ’Good fences make good neighbors.’
Misgiving1
All crying, ’We will go with you, O Wind!’
The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;
but a sleep oppresses them as they go,
and they end by bidding him stay with them.
Since ever they flung abroad in spring
the leaves had promised themselves this flight,
who now would fain seek sheltering wall,
or thicket, or hollow place for the night.
And now they answer his summoning blast
with an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,
or at utmost a little reluctant whirl
that drops them no further than where they were.
I only hope that when I am free
as they are free to go in quest
of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life
it may not seem better to me to rest.
On a Tree Fallen Across the Road1
The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
throws down in front of us is not to bar
our passage to our journey’s end for good,
but just to ask us who we think we are
Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
and make us get down in a foot of snow
debating what to do without an ax.
And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
we will not be put off the final goal
we have it hidden in us to attain,
not though we have to seize earth by the pole
and, tired of aimless circling in one place,
steer straight off after something into space.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening2
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
he will not see me stopping here
to watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
to stop without a farmhouse near
between the woods and frozen lake
the darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
to ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
but I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.
Storm Fear1
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.
The Aim was Song1
Before man came to blow it right
the wind once blew itself untaught,
and did its loudest day and night
in any rough place where it caught.
Man came to tell it what was wrong:
it hadn’t found the place to blow;
it blew too hard—the aim was song.
And listen—how it ought to go!
He took a little in his mouth,
and held it long enough for north
to be converted into south,
and then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
the wind the wind had meant to be—
a little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song—the wind could see.
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things2
The house had gone to bring again
to the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
that would have joined the house in flame
had it been the will of the wind, was left
to bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end
for teams that came by the stony road
to drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
and brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
at broken windows flew out and in,
their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
from too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
and the aged elm, though touched with fire;
and the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
and the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
one had to be versed in country things
not to believe the phoebes wept.
The Onset1
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 shall not make again all winter long
of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
I almost stumble looking up and round,
as one who overtaken by the end
gives up his errand, and lets death descend
upon him where he is, with nothing done
to evil, no important triumph won,
more than if life had never been begun.
Yet all the precedent is on my side:
I know that winter death has never tried
the earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
in long storms an undrifted four feet deep
as measured against maple, birch, and oak,
it cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;
and I shall see t
he snow all go down hill
in water of a slender April rill
that flashes tail through last year’s withered brake
and dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
and there a clump of houses with a church.
The Road Not Taken1
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both
and be one traveler, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;
then took the other, as just as fair,
and having perhaps the better claim,
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that the passing there
had worn them really about the same,
and both that morning equally lay
in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.
The Vantage Point1
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.
There amid lolling juniper reclined,
myself unseen, I see in white defined
far off the homes of men, and farther still,
the graves of men on an opposing hill,
living or dead, whichever are to mind.
And if by moon I have too much of these,
I have but to turn on my arm, and lo,
the sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow,
my breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.
The Wood-Pile2
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day
I 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 tall slim trees
too much alike to mark or name a place by
so as to say for certain I was here