Robert Frost Poems

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The Rose Family

The rose is a rose,

And was always a rose.

But the theory now goes

That the apple's a rose,

And the pear is, and so's

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose -

But were always a rose.

- Robert Frost

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For Once, Then, Something

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

-Robert Frost

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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

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Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

-Robert Frost

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Choose Something Like A Star

O Star (the fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud— It will not do to say of night, Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’ But say with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend. Tell us what elements you blend. It gives us strangely little aid, But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite, Not even stooping from its sphere, It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.

-Robert Frost

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Star-splitter

`You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something I should have done by daylight, and indeed, After the ground is frozen, I should have done Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney To make fun of my way of doing things, Or else fun of Orion’s having caught me. Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights These forces are obliged to pay respect to?’ So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming He burned his house down for the fire insurance And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfy a lifelong curiosity 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. `I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.’ There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move, Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years Trying to sell his farm and then not selling, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And bought the telescope with what it came to. He had been heard to say by several: `The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see; The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s A telescope. Someone in every town Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one. In Littleton it might as well be me.’ After such loose talk it was no surprise When he did what he did and burned his house down.

Mean laughter went about the town that day To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on, And he could wait—we’d see to him tomorrow. But the first thing next morning we reflected 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. Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us, We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers, But what we miss we go to him and ask for. He promptly gives it back, that is if still Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of. It wouldn’t do to be too hard on Brad About his telescope. Beyond the age Of being given one for Christmas gift, He had to take the best way he knew how To find himself in one. Well, all we said was He took a strange thing to be roguish over. Some sympathy was wasted on the house, A good old-timer dating back along; But a house isn’t sentient; the house Didn’t feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Out of a house and so out of a farm At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn To earn a living on the Concord railroad, As under-ticket-agent at a station Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets, Was setting out, up track and down, not plants As on a farm, but planets, evening stars That varied in their hue from red to green.

He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for stargazing. 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. That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter, Because it didn’t do a thing but split A star in two or three, the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the middle. It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one, And ought to do some good if splitting stars ‘Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?

-Robert Frost

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Looking For A Sunset Bird In Winter

The west was getting out of gold, The breath of air had died of cold, When shoeing home across the white, I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place I had to stop and lift my face; A bird with an angelic gift Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now. A single leaf was on a bough, And that was all there was to see In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill I judged that such a crystal chill Was only adding frost to snow As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke Of what was either cloud or smoke From north to south across the blue; A piercing little star was through.

-Robert Frost

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Carpe Diem

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.

-Robert Frost

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On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations

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 drought 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

[robertfrostpoemss]

A Star In A Stoneboat

For Lincoln MacVeagh

Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold, And saving that its weight suggested gold And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark. He was not used to handling stars thrown dark And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal The one thing palpable besides the soul To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing It brooded ant eggs, and bad one large wing, One not so large for flying in a ring, And a long Bird of Paradise’s tail (Though these when not in use to fly and trail It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that be might move it from the spot— The harm was done: from having been star-shot The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain, Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar, He loaded an old stoneboat with the star And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce More practical than Pegasus the horse If it could put a star back in its course. He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace But faintly reminiscent of the race Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though Commanded in a dream, forever go To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well, I do not know—I cannot stop to tell: He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye, Except at night to places in the sky Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church, And why they seek it there; for what I search I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch; Sure that though not a star of death and birth, So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth—

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin, It yet has poles, and only needs a spin To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm And run off in strange tangents with my arm, As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize Of the one world complete in any size That I am like to compass, fool or wise.

-Robert Frost

[robertfrostpoemss]

A Passing Glimpse

I often see flowers from a passing car That are gone before I can tell what they are. I want to get out of the train and go back To see what they were beside the track. I name all the flowers I am sure they weren’t: Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt— Not bluebells gracing a tunnel mouth— Not lupine living on sand and drouth. Was something brushed across my mind That no one on earth will ever find? Heaven gives its glimpses only to those Not in position to look too close.

-Robert Frost

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The Sound of Trees

I wonder about the trees. Why do we wish to bear Forever the noise of these More than another noise So close to our dwelling place? We suffer them by the day Till we lose all measure of pace, And fixity in our joys, And acquire a listening air. They are that that talks of going But never gets away; And that talks no less for knowing, As it grows wiser and older, That now it means to stay. My feet tug at the floor And my head sways to my shoulder Sometimes when I watch trees sway, From the window or the door. I shall set forth for somewhere, I shall make the reckless choice Some day when they are in voice And tossing so as to scare The white clouds over them on. I shall have less to say, But I shall be gone.

-Robert Frost

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Bond and Free

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.

-Robert Frost

[robertfrostpoemss]

A Boundless Moment

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.

-Robert Frost

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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