Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval

by Robert Frost

“I know this much:

  I’m going to put you in your bed, if first

  I have to make you build it. Come, the light.”

  When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,

  The fire got out through crannies in the stove

  And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,

  As much at home as if they’d always danced there.

  The Telephone

  “When I was just as far as I could walk

  From here to-day,

  There was an hour

  All still

  When leaning with my head against a flower

  I heard you talk.

  Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say—

  You spoke from that flower on the window sill—

  Do you remember what it was you said?”

  “First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”

  “Having found the flower and driven a bee away,

  I leaned my head,

  And holding by the stalk,

  I listened and I thought I caught the word—

  What was it? Did you call me by my name?

  Or did you say—

  Someone said ‘Come’—I heard it as I bowed.”

  “I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”

  “Well, so I came.”

  Meeting And Passing

  As I went down the hill along the wall

  There was a gate I had leaned at for the view

  And had just turned from when I first saw you

  As you came up the hill. We met. But all

  We did that day was mingle great and small

  Footprints in summer dust as if we drew

  The figure of our being less than two

  But more than one as yet. Your parasol

  Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.

  And all the time we talked you seemed to see

  Something down there to smile at in the dust.

  (Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)

  Afterward I went past what you had passed

  Before we met and you what I had passed.

  Hyla Brook

  By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

  Sought for much after that, it will be found

  Either to have gone groping underground

  (And taken with it all the Hyla breed

  That shouted in the mist a month ago,

  Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—

  Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

  Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

  Even against the way its waters went.

  Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

  Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

  A brook to none but who remember long.

  This as it will be seen is other far

  Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

  We love the things we love for what they are.

  The Oven Bird

  There is a singer everyone has heard,

  Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,

  Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.

  He says that leaves are old and that for flowers

  Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.

  He says the early petal-fall is past

  When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers

  On sunny days a moment overcast;

  And comes that other fall we name the fall.

  He says the highway dust is over all.

  The bird would cease and be as other birds

  But that he knows in singing not to sing.

  The question that he frames in all but words

  Is what to make of a diminished thing.

  Bond And Free

  Love has earth to which she clings

  With hills and circling arms about—

  Wall within wall to shut fear out.

  But Thought has need of no such things,

  For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.

  On snow and sand and turf, I see

  Where Love has left a printed trace

  With straining in the world’s embrace.

  And such is Love and glad to be.

  But Thought has shaken his ankles free.

  Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom

  And sits in Sirius’ disc all night,

  Till day makes him retrace his flight,

  With smell of burning on every plume,

  Back past the sun to an earthly room.

  His gains in heaven are what they are.

  Yet some say Love by being thrall

  And simply staying possesses all

  In several beauty that Thought fares far

  To find fused in another star.

  Birches

  When I see birches bend to left and right

  Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

  I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

  But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

  Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them

  Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

  After a rain. They click upon themselves

  As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

  As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

  Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

  Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

  Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

  You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

  They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

  And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

  So low for long, they never right themselves:

  You may see their trunks arching in the woods

  Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

  Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

  Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

  But I was going to say when Truth broke in

  With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

  (Now am I free to be poetical?)

  I should prefer to have some boy bend them

  As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

  Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

  Whose only play was what he found himself,

  Summer or winter, and could play alone.

  One by one he subdued his father’s trees

  By riding them down over and over again

  Until he took the stiffness out of them,

  And not one but hung limp, not one was left

  For him to conquer. He learned all there was

  To learn about not launching out too soon

  And so not carrying the tree away

  Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

  To the top branches, climbing carefully

  With the same pains you use to fill a cup

  Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

  Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

  Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

  So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

  And so I dream of going back to be.

  It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

  And life is too much like a pathless wood

  Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

  Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

  From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

  I’d like to get away from earth awhile

  And then come back to it and begin over.

  May no fate willfully misunderstand me

  And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

  Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

  I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

  I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

  And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

  Toward heaven, till the tree cou
ld bear no more,

  But dipped its top and set me down again.

  That would be good both going and coming back.

  One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

  Pea Brush

  I walked down alone Sunday after church

  To the place where John has been cutting trees

  To see for myself about the birch

  He said I could have to bush my peas.

  The sun in the new-cut narrow gap

  Was hot enough for the first of May,

  And stifling hot with the odor of sap

  From stumps still bleeding their life away.

  The frogs that were peeping a thousand shrill

  Wherever the ground was low and wet,

  The minute they heard my step went still

  To watch me and see what I came to get.

  Birch boughs enough piled everywhere!—

  All fresh and sound from the recent axe.

  Time someone came with cart and pair

  And got them off the wild flower’s backs.

  They might be good for garden things

  To curl a little finger round,

  The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings,

  And lift themselves up off the ground.

  Small good to anything growing wild,

  They were crooking many a trillium

  That had budded before the boughs were piled

  And since it was coming up had to come.

  Putting in the Seed

  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

  Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.

  (Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,

  Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)

  And go along with you ere you lose sight

  Of what you came for and become like me,

  Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.

  How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed

  On through the watching for that early birth

  When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,

  The sturdy seedling with arched body comes

  Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

  A Time to Talk

  When a friend calls to me from the road

  And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

  I don’t stand still and look around

  On all the hills I haven’t hoed,

  And shout from where I am, What is it?

  No, not as there is a time to talk.

  I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

  Blade-end up and five feet tall,

  And plod: I go up to the stone wall

  For a friendly visit.

  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.

  An Encounter

  Once on the kind of day called “weather breeder,”

  When the heat slowly hazes and the sun

  By its own power seems to be undone,

  I was half boring through, half climbing through

  A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar

  And scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated,

  And sorry I ever left the road I knew,

  I paused and rested on a sort of hook

  That had me by the coat as good as seated,

  And since there was no other way to look,

  Looked up toward heaven, and there against the blue,

  Stood over me a resurrected tree,

  A tree that had been down and raised again—

  A barkless spectre. He had halted too,

  As if for fear of treading upon me.

  I saw the strange position of his hands—

  Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands

  Of wire with something in it from men to men.

  “You here?” I said. “Where aren’t you nowadays

  And what’s the news you carry—if you know?

  And tell me where you’re off for—Montreal?

  Me? I’m not off for anywhere at all.

  Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways

  Half looking for the orchid Calypso.”

  Range Finding

  The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung

  And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest

  Before it stained a single human breast.

  The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

  And still the bird revisited her young.

  A butterfly its fall had dispossessed

  A moment sought in air his flower of rest,

  Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

  On the bare upland pasture there had spread

  O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread

  And straining cables wet with silver dew.

  A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.

  The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,

  But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

  The Hill Wife

  LONELINESS

  (Her Word)

  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 breasts

  But with each other and themselves

  And their built or driven nests.

  HOUSE FEAR

  Always — 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 instead

  Of seizing from us as he might have seized.

  Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,

  Or being very young (and he was pleased

  To 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 DREAM

  She had no saying dark enough

  For the dark pine that kept

  Forever trying the window-latch

  Of 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 herself

  On her lips.

  And once she went to break a bough

  Of black alder.

  She strayed so far she scarcely heard.

  When he called her—

  And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —

  Or return.

  She stood, and then she ran and hid

  In the fern.

  He never found her, though he looked

  Everywhere,

  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.

  The Bonfire

  “Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,

  As reckless as the best of them to-night,

  By setting fire to all the brush we piled

  With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.

  Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.

  The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough

  Down dark converging paths between the pines.

  Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.

  Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile

  The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk

  Of people brought to windows by a light

  Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.

  Rouse them all, both the free and not so free

  With saying what they’d like to do to us

  For what they’d better wait till we have done.