Favorite Poems
by
Robert Frost
- 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.
- Robert Frost
- Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
- And sorry I could not travel both
- And be one traveller, 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
- As I came to the edge of the woods,
- Thrush music -- hark!
- Now if it was dusk outside,
- Inside it was dark.
- To dark in the woods for a bird
- By sleight of wing
- To better its perch for the night,
- Though it still could sing.
- The last of the light of the sun
- That had died in the west
- Still lived for one song more
- In a thrush's breast.
- Far in the pillared dark
- Thrush music went --
- Almost like a call to come in
- To the dark and lament.
- But no, I was out for stars;
- I would not come in.
- I meant not even if asked;
- And I hadn't been.
- 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-by;
- And further still at an unearthly height
- One luminary clock against the sky
- Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
- I have been one acquainted with the night,
- Robert Frost
- These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
- The total sky almost without defect,
- And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
- Will like the flowers beside them, soon be gone,
- And yet not out by any brook or river,
- But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
- The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
- To darken nature and be summer woods--
- Let them think twice before they use their powers
- To blot out and drink up and sweep away
- These flowery waters and these watery flowers
- From snow that melted only yesterday.
- Robert Frost
- Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
- In a field I looked into going past,
- And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
- But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
- The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
- All animals are smothered in their lairs.
- I am too absent-spirited to count;
- The loneliness includes me unawares.
- And lonely as it is that loneliness
- Will be more lonely ere it be less--
- A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
- With no expression, nothing to express.
- They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
- Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
- I have it in me so much nearer home
- To scare myself with my own desert places.
- Robert Frost
- 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
- The shattered water made a misty din.
- Great waves looked over others coming in,
- And thought of doing something to the shore
- That water never did to land before.
- The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
- Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
- You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
- The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
- The cliff in being backed by continent;
- It looked as if a night of dark intent
- Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
- Someone had better be prepared for rage.
- There would be more than ocean-water broken
- Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
- 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.
- Robert Frost
- The way a crow
- Shook down on me
- The dust of snow
- From a hemlock tree
- Has given my heart
- A change of mood
- And saved some part
- Of a day I had rued.
- Robert Frost
- All out of doors looked darkly in at him
- Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
- That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
- What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
- Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
- What kept him from remembering what it was
- That brought him to that creaking room was age.
- He stood with barrels round him - at a loss.
- And having scared the cellar under him
- In clomping there, he scared it once again
- In clomping off; - and scared the outer night,
- Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
- Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
- But nothing so like beating on a box.
- A light he was to no one but himself
- Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
- A quiet light, and then not even that.
- He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
- So late-arising, to the broken moon
- As better than the sun in any case
- For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
- His icicles along the wall to keep;
- And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
- Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
- And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
- One aged man - one man - can't keep a house,
- A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
- It's thus he does it of a winter night.
- Robert Frost
- 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 neighbort 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 neighhours'.
- 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.
- Robert Frost
- 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
- 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.
- One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
- And then there was a pile of wood for which
- I 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. Clematis
- Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.
- What held it though on one side was a tree
- Still 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 labour 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
- You'll wait a long, long time for anything much
- To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
- And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
- The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
- Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
- The planets seem to interfere in their curves -
- But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
- We may as well go patiently on with our life,
- And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
- For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
- It is true the longest drout will end in rain,
- The longest peace in China will end in strife.
- Still it wouldn't reward the watcher to stay awake
- In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
- On his particular time and personal sight.
- That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.
- Robert Frost
- My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
- Toward heaven still.
- And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
- Beside it, and there may be two or three
- Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
- But I am done with apple-picking now.
- Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
- The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
- I cannot shake the shimmer from my sight
- I got from looking through a pane of glass
- I skimmed this morning from the water-trough,
- And held against the world of hoary grass.
- It melted, and I let it fall and break.
- But I was well
- Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
- And I could tell
- What form my dreaming was about to take.
- Magnified apples appear and reappear,
- Stem end and blossom end,
- And every fleck of russet showing clear.
- My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
- It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
- And I keep hearing from the cellar-bin
- That rumbling sound
- Of load on load of apples coming in.
- For I have had too much
- Of apple-picking; I am overtired
- Of the great harvest I myself desired.
- There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
- Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall,
- For all
- That struck the earth,
- No matter if not bruised, or spiked with stubble,
- Went surely to the cider-apple heap
- As of no worth.
- One can see what will trouble
- This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
- Were he not gone,
- The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
- Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
- Or just some human sleep.
- Robert Frost