Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval (2 page)

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 picking the faded blue

Of the last remaining aster flower

To carry again to you.

How countlessly they congregate

O’er our tumultuous snow,

Which flows in shapes as tall as trees

When wintry winds do blow!—

As if with keenness for our fate,

Our faltering few steps on

To white rest, and a place of rest

Invisible at dawn,—

And yet with neither love nor hate,

Those stars like some snow-white

Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes

Without the gift of sight.

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.

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 cagèd yellow bird

Hung over her in tune,

He marked her through 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 sighed upon the sill,

He gave the sash a shake,

As witness all within

Who lay that night awake.

Perchance he half prevailed

To win her for the flight

From the firelit 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.

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.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfil.

I left you in the morning,

And in the morning glow,

You walked a way beside me

To make me sad to go.

Do you know me in the gloaming,

Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming?

Are you dumb because you know me not,

Or dumb because you know?

All for me? And not a question

For the faded flowers gay

That could take me from beside you

For the ages of a day?

They are yours, and be the measure

Of their worth for you to treasure,

The measure of the little while

That I’ve been long away.

A saturated meadow,

Sun-shaped and jewel-small,

A circle scarcely wider

Than the trees around were tall;

Where winds were quite excluded,

And the air was stifling sweet

With the breath of many flowers,—

A temple of the heat.

There we bowed us in the burning,

As the sun’s right worship is,

To pick where none could miss them

A thousand orchises;

For though the grass was scattered,

Yet every second spear

Seemed tipped with wings of color,

That tinged the atmosphere.

We raised a simple prayer

Before we left the spot,

That in the general mowing

That place might be forgot;

Or if not all so favoured,

Obtain such grace of hours,

That none should mow the grass there

While so confused with flowers.

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.

Afield at Dusk

What things for dream there are when spectre-like,

Moving among tall haycocks lightly piled,

I enter alone upon the stubble field,

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 night-hawks peopling heaven,

Each circling each with vague unearthly cry,

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,

And seek it endlessly with purblind haste;

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 memory of one absent most,

For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.

When I was young, we dwelt in a vale

By a misty fen that rang all night,

And thus it was the maidens pale

I knew so well, whose garments trail

Across the reeds to a window light.

The fen had every kind of bloom,

And for every kind there was a face,

And a voice that has sounded in my room

Across the sill from the outer gloom.

Each came singly unto her place,

But all came every night with the mist;

And often they brought so much to say

Of things of moment to which, they wist,

One so lonely was fain to list,

That the stars were almost faded away

Before the last went, heavy with dew,

Back to the place from which she came—

Where the bird was before it flew,

Where the flower was before it grew,

Where bird and flower were one and the same.

And thus it is I know so well

Why the flower has odor, the bird has song.

You have only to ask me, and I can tell.

No, not vainly there did I dwell,

Nor vainly listen all the night long.

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.

They leave us so to the way we took,

As two in whom they were proved mistaken,

That we sit sometimes in the wayside nook,

With mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look,

And
try
if we cannot feel forsaken.

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 bruisèd plant,

I look into the crater of the ant.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

The well was dry beside the door,

And so we went with pail and can

Across the fields behind the house

To seek the brook if still it ran;

Not loth to have excuse to go,

Because the autumn eve was fair

(Though chill), because the fields were ours,

And by the brook our woods were there.

We ran as if to meet the moon

That slowly dawned behind the trees,

The barren boughs without the leaves,

Without the birds, without the breeze.

But once within the wood, we paused

Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,

Ready to run to hiding new

With laughter when she found us soon.

Each laid on other a staying hand

To listen ere we dared to look,

And in the hush we joined to make

We heard, we knew we heard the brook.

A note as from a single place,

A slender tinkling fall that made

Now drops that floated on the pool

Like pearls, and now a silver blade.

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone find us really out.

’Tis pity if the case require

(Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us where they are.