Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!	
Bring the singer, bring the nester;	
Give the buried flower a dream;	
Make the settled snow-bank steam;	
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,	
Bathe my window, make it flow,	
Melt it as the ices go;	
Melt the glass and leave the sticks	
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;	
Swing the picture on the wall;	
Run the rattling pages o’er;	
Scatter poems on the floor;	
Turn the poet out of door.

Ghost House

I dwell in a lonely house I know	
That vanished many a summer ago,	
  And left no trace but the cellar walls,	
  And a cellar in which the daylight falls,	
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.
 
O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield	
The woods come back to the mowing field;	
  The orchard tree has grown one copse	
  Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;	
The footpath down to the well is healed.
 
I dwell with a strangely aching heart	
In that vanished abode there far apart	
  On that disused and forgotten road	
  That has no dust-bath now for the toad.	
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;
 
The whippoorwill is coming to shout	
And hush and cluck and flutter about:	
  I hear him begin far enough away	
  Full many a time to say his say	
Before he arrives to say it out.
 
It is under the small, dim, summer star.	
I know not who these mute folk are	
  Who share the unlit place with me—	
  Those stones out under the low-limbed tree	
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.
 
They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,	
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,—	
  With none among them that ever sings,	
  And yet, in view of how many things,	
As sweet companions as might be had.

Mending Wall

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 neighbour 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 fallen 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 out-door 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 neighbours.”	
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder	
If I could put a notion in his head:	
“Why do they make good neighbours? 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 offence.	
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 neighbours.”

The Road Not Taken

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

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

On Being Idolized

The wave sucks back and with the last of water
It wraps a wisp of seaweed round my legs,
And with the swift rush of its sandy dregs
So undermines my barefoot stand I totter,
And did I not take steps would be tipped over
Like the ideal of some mistaken lover.

Into My Own

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.

— Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue	
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,	
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,	
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?	
 
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) —
Though some savants make earth include the sky;	
And blue so far above us comes so high,	
It only gives our wish for blue a whet

- Robert Frost

The Lockless Door

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,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a “Come in”
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)