Robert Frost poems

[*JujU*]

The Tuft of Flowers


by Robert Frost






I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.


The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.


I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.


But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been -- alone,


'As all must be,' I said within my heart,
'Whether they work together or apart.'


But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,


Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night
Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.


And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.


And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.


I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;


But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,


A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.


The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,


Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.


The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,


That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,


And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;


But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;


And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.


'Men work together,' I told him from the heart,
'Whether they work together or apart.'

 

[*JujU*]

The Witch of Coos


by Robert Frost






I staid the night for shelter at a farm
Behind the mountains, with a mother and son,
Two old-believers. They did all the talking.


MOTHER Folks think a witch who has familiar spirits
She could call up to pass a winter evening,
But won't, should be burned at the stake or something.
Summoning spirits isn't 'Button, button,
Who's got the button,' I would have them know.


SON: Mother can make a common table rear
And kick with two legs like an army mule.


MOTHER: And when I've done it, what good have I
done?
Rather than tip a table for you, let me
Tell you what Ralle the Sioux Control once told me.
He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him
How could that be -- I thought the dead were souls,
He broke my trance. Don't that make you suspicious
That there's something the dead are keeping back?
Yes, there's something the dead are keeping back.


SON: You wouldn't want to tell him what we have
Up attic, mother?


MOTHER: Bones -- a skeleton.


SON: But the headboard of mother's bed is pushed
Against the' attic door: the door is nailed.
It's harmless. Mother hears it in the night
Halting perplexed behind the barrier
Of door and headboard. Where it wants to get
Is back into the cellar where it came from.


MOTHER: We'll never let them, will we, son! We'll
never !


SON: It left the cellar forty years ago
And carried itself like a pile of dishes
Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen,
Another from the kitchen to the bedroom,
Another from the bedroom to the attic,
Right past both father and mother, and neither stopped
it.
Father had gone upstairs; mother was downstairs.
I was a baby: I don't know where I was.


MOTHER: The only fault my husband found with me --
I went to sleep before I went to bed,
Especially in winter when the bed
Might just as well be ice and the clothes snow.
The night the bones came up the cellar-stairs
Toffile had gone to bed alone and left me,
But left an open door to cool the room off
So as to sort of turn me out of it.
I was just coming to myself enough
To wonder where the cold was coming from,
When I heard Toffile upstairs in the bedroom
And thought I heard him downstairs in the cellar.
The board we had laid down to walk dry-shod on
When there was water in the cellar in spring
Struck the hard cellar bottom. And then someone
Began the stairs, two footsteps for each step,
The way a man with one leg and a crutch,
Or a little child, comes up. It wasn't Toffile:
It wasn't anyone who could be there.
The bulkhead double-doors were double-locked
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
The cellar windows were banked up with sawdust
And swollen tight and buried under snow.
It was the bones. I knew them -- and good reason.
My first impulse was to get to the knob
And hold the door. But the bones didn't try
The door; they halted helpless on the landing,
Waiting for things to happen in their favour.'
The faintest restless rustling ran all through them.
I never could have done the thing I did
If the wish hadn't been too strong in me
To see how they were mounted for this walk.
I had a vision of them put together
Not like a man, but like a chandelier.
So suddenly I flung the door wide on him.
A moment he stood balancing with emotion,
And all but lost himself. (A tongue of fire
Flashed out and licked along his upper teeth.
Smoke rolled inside the sockets of his eyes.)
Then he came at me with one hand outstretched,
The way he did in life once; but this time
I struck the hand off brittle on the floor,
And fell back from him on the floor myself.
The finger-pieces slid in all directions.
(Where did I see one of those pieces lately?
Hand me my button-box- it must be there.)
I sat up on the floor and shouted, 'Toffile,
It's coming up to you.' It had its choice
Of the door to the cellar or the hall.
It took the hall door for the novelty,
And set off briskly for so slow a thing,
Stillgoing every which way in the joints, though,
So that it looked like lightning or a scribble,
>From the slap I had just now given its hand.
I listened till it almost climbed the stairs
>From the hall to the only finished bedroom,
Before I got up to do anything;
Then ran and shouted, 'Shut the bedroom door,
Toffile, for my sake!' 'Company?' he said,
'Don't make me get up; I'm too warm in bed.'
So lying forward weakly on the handrail
I pushed myself upstairs, and in the light
(The kitchen had been dark) I had to own
I could see nothing. 'Toffile, I don't see it.
It's with us in the room though. It's the bones.'
'What bones?' 'The cellar bones- out of the grave.'
That made him throw his bare legs out of bed
And sit up by me and take hold of me.
I wanted to put out the light and see
If I could see it, or else mow the room,
With our arms at the level of our knees,
And bring the chalk-pile down. 'I'll tell you what-
It's looking for another door to try.
The uncommonly deep snow has made him think
Of his old song, The Wild Colonial Boy,
He always used to sing along the tote-road.
He's after an open door to get out-doors.
Let's trap him with an open door up attic.'
Toffile agreed to that, and sure enough,
Almost the moment he was given an opening,
The steps began to climb the attic stairs.
I heard them. Toffile didn't seem to hear them.
'Quick !' I slammed to the door and held the knob.
'Toffile, get nails.' I made him nail the door shut,
And push the headboard of the bed against it.
Then we asked was there anything
Up attic that we'd ever want again.
The attic was less to us than the cellar.
If the bones liked the attic, let them have it.
Let them stay in the attic. When they sometimes
Come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed
Behind the door and headboard of the bed,
Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers,
With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter,
That's what I sit up in the dark to say-
To no one any more since Toffile died.
2o3 Let them stay in the attic since they went there.
I promised Toffile to be cruel to them
For helping them be cruel once to him.


SON: We think they had a grave down in the cellar.


MOTHER: We know they had a grave down in the cellar.


SON: We never could find out whose bones they were.


MOTHER: Yes, we could too, son. Tell the truth for once.
They were a man's his father killed for me.
I mean a man he killed instead of me.
The least I could do was to help dig their grave.
We were about it one night in the cellar.
Son knows the story: but 'twas not for him
To tell the truth, suppose the time had come.
Son looks surprised to see me end a lie
We'd kept all these years between ourselves
So as to have it ready for outsiders.
But to-night I don't care enough to lie-
I don't remember why I ever cared.
Toffile, if he were here, I don't believe
Could tell you why he ever cared himself-


She hadn't found the finger-bone she wanted
Among the buttons poured out in her lap.
I verified the name next morning: Toffile.
The rural letter-box said Toffile Lajway.

 

[*JujU*]

To Earthward


by Robert Frost






Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air


That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of- was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Down hill at dusk?


I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.


I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.


Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain


Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.


When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,


The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.

 

[*JujU*]

Tree at my Window


by Robert Frost






Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.


Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.


But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You 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.

 

[*JujU*]

Waiting


by Robert Frost






Afield at dusk


What things for dream there are when specter-like,
Moving amond tall haycocks lightly piled,
I enter alone upon the stubbled filed,
From which the laborers' voices late have died,
And in the antiphony of afterglow
And rising full moon, sit me down
Upon the full moon's side of the first haycock
And lose myself amid so many alike.


I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,
Preventing shadow until the moon prevail;
I dream upon the nighthawks peopling heaven,
Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;
And on the bat's mute antics, who would seem
Dimly to have made out my secret place,
Only to lose it when he pirouettes,
On the last swallow's sweep; and on the rasp
In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,
That, silenced by my advent, finds once more,
After an interval, his instrument,
And tries once--twice--and thrice if I be there;
And on the worn book of old-golden song
I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold
And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;
But on the memor of one absent, most,
For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.

 

[*JujU*]

Wind and Window Flower


by Robert Frost






Lovers, forget your love,
And list to the love of these,
She a window flower,
And he a winter breeze.


When the frosty window veil
Was melted down at noon,
And the caged yellow bird
Hung over her in tune,


He marked her though the pane,
He could not help but mark,
And only passed her by
To come again at dark.


He was a winter wind,
Concerned with ice and snow,
Dead weeds and unmated birds,
And little of love could know.


But he signed upon the sill,
He gave the sash a shake,
As witness all within
Who lay that night awake.


Perchange he half prevailed
To win her for the flight
From the firelight looking-glass
And warm stove-window light.


But the flower leaned aside
And thought of naught to say,
And morning found the breeze
A hundred miles away.

 

[*JujU*]

A Boundless Moment


by Robert Frost






He halted in the wind, and -- what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.


"Oh, that's the Paradise-in-bloom," I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
had we but in us to assume in march
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.


We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year's leaves.

 

[*JujU*]

A Cliff Dwelling


by Robert Frost






There sandy seems the golden sky
And golden seems the sandy plain.
No habitation meets the eye
Unless in the horizon rim,
Some halfway up the limestone wall,
That spot of black is not a stain
Or shadow, but a cavern hole,
Where someone used to climb and crawl
To rest from his besetting fears.
I see the callus on his soul
The disappearing last of him
And of his race starvation slim,
Oh years ago - ten thousand years.

 

[*JujU*]

A Dream Pang


by Robert Frost






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
(This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,
But did not enter, though the wish was strong:
You shook your pensive head as who should say,
'I dare not--too far in his footsteps stray--
He must seek me would he undo the wrong.


Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all
Behind low boughs the trees let down outside;
And the sweet pang it cost me not to call
And tell you that I saw does still abide.
But 'tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,
For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.

 

[*JujU*]

A Late Walk


by Robert Frost






When I got up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.


And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words.


A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.


I end not far from my going forth,
By pickign the faded blue
Of the las remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

 

[*JujU*]

A Minor Bird


by Robert Frost






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
When it seemed as if I could bear no more.


The fault must partly have been in me.
The bird was not to blame for his key.


And of course there must be something wrong
In wanting to silence any song.

 

[*JujU*]

A Peck of Gold


by Robert Frost






Dust always blowing about the town,
Except when sea-fog laid it down,
And I was one of the children told
Some of the blowing dust was gold.


All the dust the wind blew high
Appeared like gold in the sunset sky,
But I was one of the children told
Some of the dust was really gold.


Such was life in the Golden Gate:
Gold dusted all we drank and ate,
And I was one of the children told,
'We all must eat our peck of gold'.

 

[*JujU*]

A Question


by Robert Frost






A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

 

[*JujU*]

A Soldier


by Robert Frost






He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it ploughed the dust.
If we who sight along it round the world,
See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
It is because like men we look too near,
Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
Our missiles always make too short an arc.
They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;
They make us cringe for metal-point on stone.
But this we know, the obstacle that checked
And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
Further than target ever showed or shone.

 

[*JujU*]

Acquainted with the Night


by Robert Frost






I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.


I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.


I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,


But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky


Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

 

[*JujU*]

An Encounter


by Robert Frost






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."

 

[*JujU*]

Asking for Roses


by Robert Frost






A house that lacks, seemingly, mistress and master,
With doors that none but the wind ever closes,
Its floor all littered with glass and with plaster;
It stands in a garden of old-fashioned roses.


I pass by that way in the gloaming with Mary;
'I wonder,' I say, 'who the owner of those is.'
'Oh, no one you know,' she answers me airy,
'But one we must ask if we want any roses.'


So we must join hands in the dew coming coldly
There in the hush of the wood that reposes,
And turn and go up to the open door boldly,
And knock to the echoes as beggars for roses.


'Pray, are you within there, Mistress Who-were-you?'
'Tis Mary that speaks and our errand discloses.
'Pray, are you within there? Bestir you, bestir you!
'Tis summer again; there's two come for roses.


'A word with you, that of the singer recalling--
Old Herrick: a saying that every maid knows is
A flower unplucked is but left to the falling,
And nothing is gained by not gathering roses.'


We do not loosen our hands' intertwining
(Not caring so very much what she supposes),
There when she comes on us mistily shining
And grants us by silence the boon of her roses.

 

[*JujU*]

Birches


by Robert Frost






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-coloured
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,
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 could 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.

 

[*JujU*]

Bond and Free


by Robert Frost






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 turn, 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.

 

[*JujU*]

Carpe Diem


by Robert Frost






Age saw two quiet children
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,
He waited, (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
'Be happy, happy, happy,
And seize the day of pleasure.'
The age-long theme is Age's.
'Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it.
And yet not know they have it.
But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing-
Too present to imagine.