Robert Frost

“ New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,
With no suspicion in stem-end or blossom-end
Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,
And so not good for anything but cider.
Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats
Far up the birches out of reach of man. ”

“ The same Paul at the same old feats of logging.
The question everywhere was why should Paul
Object to being asked a civil question—
A man you could say almost anything to
Short of a fighting word. You have the answers.
And there was one more not so fair to Paul:
That Paul had married a wife not his equal.
Paul was ashamed of her. To match a hero,
She would have had to be a heroine;
Instead of which she was some half-breed squaw.
But if the story Murphy told was true,
She wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.
You know Paul could do wonders. ”

“ I refuse to adapt myself a mite
To any change from hot to cold, from wet
To dry, from poor to rich, or back again.
I make a virtue of my suffering
From nearly everything that goes on round me. [10]
In other words, I know wherever I am,
Being the creature of literature I am,
I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake.
Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:
“Why this is Hell, nor am I out of it.”
Samoa, Russia, Ireland I complain of,
No less than England, France and Italy.
Because I wrote my novels in New Hampshire
Is no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire. ”

“ And neither would I choose to be a puke
Who cares not what he does in company,
And, when he can’t do anything, falls back
On words, and tries his worst to make words speak
Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.
It seems a narrow choice the age insists on.
How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year.
“Come, but this isn’t choosing—puke or prude?”
Well, if I have to choose one or the other,
I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer
With an income in cash of say a thousand
(From say a publisher in New York City) . ”

“ 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. ”

“ The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine,
If I was not to speak of it to you
And see you pleased once more with words of mine?
84
NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold. ”

“ He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said. [19]
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
30 Because it didn’t do a thing but split ”

“ It never could have happened in New Hampshire.
The only person really soiled with trade
I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire
Was someone who had just come back ashamed
From selling things in California.
He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls
On turrets like Constantinople, deep
In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,
As if to put forever out of mind
The hope of being, as we say, received. ”

“ Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
“I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.
He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, ‘Sakes,
It’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know!
Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.” ”

“ On Moosilauke, but woman signs to man,
Only bewitched so I would last him longer.
Up where the trees grow short, the mosses tall,
I made him gather me wet snow berries
On slippery rocks beside a waterfall.
I made him do it for me in the dark.
And he liked everything I made him do.
I hope if he is where he sees me now
He’s so far off he can’t see what I’ve come to.
You can come down from everything to nothing. ”

“ To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.
“Now you know how it feels,” my brother said,
“To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call them,
That when it thinks it has escaped the fox
By growing where it shouldn’t—on a birch,
Where a fox wouldn’t think to look for it—
And if he looked and found it, couldn’t reach it—
Just then come you and I to gather it.
Only you have the advantage of the grapes
In one way: you have one more stem to cling by,
And promise more resistance to the picker.” ”

“ And the birds on her outer window sill,
And how she tended both, or had them tended:
She never tended anything herself.
She was ‘shut in’ for life. She lived her whole
Life long in bed, and wrote her things in bed. ”

“ I only hope that when I am free
As they are free to go in quest
Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life
It may not seem better to me to rest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ BLUE-BUTTERFLY DAY
It is blue-butterfly day here in spring,
And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry
There is more unmixed color on the wing
Than flowers will show for days unless they hurry. ”

“ In many Marches. [7] And they lie like wedges,
Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,
And are a figure of the way the strong
Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,
One thick where one is thin and vice versa.
New Hampshire raises the Connecticut
In a trout hatchery near Canada,
But soon divides the river with Vermont. ”

“ NEW HAMPSHIRE
3
NEW HAMPSHIRE
I met a lady from the South who said
(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it) :
“None of my family ever worked, or had
A thing to sell.” I don’t suppose the work
Much matters. You may work for all of me.
I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.
The having anything to sell [1] is what
Is the disgrace in man or state or nation. ”

“ New Hampshire used to have at Salem
A company we called the White Corpuscles,
Whose duty was at any hour of night
To rush in sheets and fool’s caps where they smelled
A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented
And give someone the Skipper Ireson’s Ride.
One each of everything as in a show-case.
8 More than enough land for a specimen
You’ll say she has, but there there enters in
Something else to protect her from herself.
There quality [4] makes up for quantity.
Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale. ”

“ The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not to bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we are
Insisting always on our own way so. ”

“ In fetid darkness still to live and run—
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. ”

“ But just to ask us who we think we are
Insisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an axe.
And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the pole
And, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.
110
OUR SINGING STRENGTH
It snowed in spring on earth so dry and warm
The flakes could find no landing place to form. ”

“ The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;
New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil. ”

“ But when Paul put his finger in the grease,
It wasn’t grease at all, but a long slot.
The log was hollow. They were sawing pine.
“First time I ever saw a hollow pine.
That comes of having Paul around the place.
Take it to hell for me,” the sawyer said.
Everyone had to have a look at it,
And tell Paul what he ought to do about it.
(They treated it as his.) “You take a jack-knife,
And spread the opening, and you’ve got a dug-out
All dug to go a-fishing in.” To Paul
The hollow looked too sound and clean and empty
Ever to have housed birds or beasts or bees. ”

“ TO EARTHWARD
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 ”

“ I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind—
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart. ”

“ Free from the least knot, equal to the strain
Of bending like a sword across the knee.
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work. He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the axe-head.
“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.” ”

“ With the curves of his axe-helves and his having
Used these unscrupulously to bring me
To see for once the inside of his house.
Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one
To leave it to, whether the right to hold
Such doubts of education should depend
Upon the education of those who held them? ”

“ The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been. ”

“ I’ll find that fountain if it takes all summer,
And both of our united strengths, to do it.”
68
“You’ve lost it, then?”
“Not so but I can find it.
No doubt it’s grown up some to woods around it.
The mountain may have shifted since I saw it
In eighty-five.”
“As long ago as that?”
“If I remember rightly, it had sprung
A leak and emptied then. And forty years
Can do a good deal to bad masonry.
You won’t see any Mormon swimming in it.
But you have said it, and we’re off to find it.
Old as I am, I’m going to let myself
Be dragged by you all over everywhere—”
“I thought you were a guide.” ”

“ To want to make New Hampshire people over.
They taunt the lofty land with little men.
I don’t know what to say about the people.
For art’s sake one could almost wish them worse [12]
Rather than better. How are we to write
The Russian novel in America
As long as life goes so unterribly? ”

“ So there were witnesses that Paul was married,
And not to anyone to be ashamed of.
Everyone had been wrong in judging Paul.
Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs
About his wife to keep her to himself.
Paul was what’s called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn’t anybody else’s business,
Either to praise her, or so much as name her,
And he’d thank people not to think of her.
Murphy’s idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.
49
WILD GRAPES
What tree may not the fig be gathered from? ”

“ I wouldn’t be a prude afraid of nature.
I know a man who took a double axe
And went alone against a grove of trees;
But his heart failing him, he dropped the axe
And ran for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold:
“Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood ”

“ Across the roar and chaos, and the words
We saw him say along the zigzag journey
Were doubtless as the words we heard him say
15 On coming nearer: “Wasn’t she an i-deal
Son-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an i-deal.”
For all her mountains fall a little short,
Her people not quite short enough for Art,
She’s still New Hampshire, a most restful state.
Lately in converse with a New York alec
About the new school of the pseudo-phallic,
I found myself in a close corner where
I had to make an almost funny choice.
“Choose you which you will be—a prude, or puke,
Mewling and puking in the public arms.” ”

“ Advantages of growing almost wild
Under the watchful eye of hawk and eagle—
Dorkings because they’re spoken of by Chaucer,
Sussex because they’re spoken of by Herrick.
She has a touch of gold. New Hampshire gold— [2]
You may have heard of it. ”

“ If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving. ”

“ We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes. ”

“ Was what he thought of—not me, but my axe;
Me only as I took my axe to heart.
It was the bad axe-helve some one had sold me—
“Made on machine,” he said, ploughing the grain
With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran
Across the handle’s long drawn serpentine,
Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.
“You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off.
Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?”
38 Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?
“Come on my house and I put you one in
What’s las’ awhile—good hick’ry what’s grow crooked,
De second growt’ I cut myself—tough, tough!” ”

“ When wilder mothers than our wildest now
Hung babies out on branches by the hands
To dry or wash or tan, I don’t know which
(You’ll have to ask an evolutionist) —
I held on uncomplainingly for life.
My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.
“What are you doing up there in those grapes?
Don’t be afraid. A few of them won’t hurt you. ”

“ About our place among the infinities.
“What do you want with one of those blame things?”
I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”
“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,” he said. ”

“ Do you know,
Considering the market, there are more
Poems produced than any other thing? [6]
9 No wonder poets sometimes have to seem
So much more business-like than business men.
Their wares are so much harder to get rid of. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.
What gold more innocent could one have asked for? ”

“ The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,—
Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,
Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a little—a French touch in that. ”

“ He said, in climate none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity. ”