Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval (14 page)

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.”

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung

And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest

Before it stained a single human breast.

The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

And still the bird revisited her young.

A butterfly its fall had dispossessed

A moment sought in air his flower of rest,

Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread

O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread

And straining cables wet with silver dew.

A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.

The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,

But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

LONELINESS

(Her Word)

One ought not to have to care

So much as you and I

Care when the birds come round the house

To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back

With whatever it is they sing;

The truth being we are as much

Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here —

With birds that fill their breasts

But with each other and themselves

And their built or driven nests.

HOUSE FEAR

Always — I tell you this they learned—

Always at night when they returned

To the lonely house from far away

To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,

They learned to rattle the lock and key

To give whatever might chance to be

Warning and time to be off in flight:

And preferring the out- to the in-door night,

They. learned to leave the house-door wide

Until they had lit the lamp inside.

THE SMILE

(Her Word)

I didn’t like the way he went away.

That smile! It never came of being gay.

Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure!

Perhaps because we gave him only bread

And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.

Perhaps because he let us give instead

Of seizing from us as he might have seized.

Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,

Or being very young (and he was pleased

To have a vision of us old and dead).

I wonder how far down the road he’s got.

He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough

For the dark pine that kept

Forever trying the window-latch

Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands

That with every futile pass

Made the great tree seem as a little bird

Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,

And only one of the two

Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream

Of what the tree might do.

THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,

And too wild,

And since there were but two of them,

And no child,

And work was little in the house,

She was free,

And followed where he furrowed field,

Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed

The fresh chips,

With a song only to herself

On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough

Of black alder.

She strayed so far she scarcely heard.

When he called her—

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —

Or return.

She stood, and then she ran and hid

In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked

Everywhere,

And he asked at her mother’s house

Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that

The ties gave,

And he learned of finalities

Besides the grave.

“Oh, let’s go up the hill and scare ourselves,

As reckless as the best of them to-night,

By setting fire to all the brush we piled

With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.

Oh, let’s not wait for rain to make it safe.

The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough

Down dark converging paths between the pines.

Let’s not care what we do with it to-night.

Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile

The way we piled it. And let’s be the talk

Of people brought to windows by a light

Thrown from somewhere against their wall-paper.

Rouse them all, both the free and not so free

With saying what they’d like to do to us

For what they’d better wait till we have done.

Let’s all but bring to life this old volcano,

If that is what the mountain ever was—

And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will. . . .”

“And scare you too?” the children said together.

“Why wouldn’t it scare me to have a fire

Begin in smudge with ropy smoke and know

That still, if I repent, I may recall it,

But in a moment not: a little spurt

Of burning fatness, and then nothing but

The fire itself can put it out, and that

By burning out, and before it burns out

It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,

And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,

Made the dim trees stand back in wider circle—

Done so much and I know not how much more

I mean it shall not do if I can bind it.

Well if it doesn’t with its draft bring on

A wind to blow in earnest from some quarter,

As once it did with me upon an April.

The breezes were so spent with winter blowing

They seemed to fail the bluebirds under them

Short of the perch their languid flight was toward;

And my flame made a pinnacle to heaven

As I walked once round it in possession.

But the wind out of doors—you know the saying.

There came a gust. You used to think the trees

Made wind by fanning since you never knew

It blow but that you saw the trees in motion.

Something or someone watching made that gust.

It put the flame tip-down and dabbed the grass

Of over-winter with the least tip-touch

Your tongue gives salt or sugar in your hand.

The place it reached to blackened instantly.

The black was all there was by day-light,

That and the merest curl of cigarette smoke—

And a flame slender as the hepaticas,

Blood-root, and violets so soon to be now.

But the black spread like black death on the ground,

And I think the sky darkened with a cloud

Like winter and evening coming on together.

There were enough things to be thought of then.

Where the field stretches toward the north

And setting sun to Hyla brook, I gave it

To flames without twice thinking, where it verges

Upon the road, to flames too, though in fear

They might find fuel there, in withered brake,

Grass its full length, old silver golden-rod,

And alder and grape vine entanglement,

To leap the dusty deadline. For my own

I took what front there was beside. I knelt

And thrust hands in and held my face away.

Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating.

A board is the best weapon if you have it.

I had my coat. And oh, I knew, I knew,

And said out loud, I couldn’t bide the smother

And heat so close in; but the thought of all

The woods and town on fire by me, and all

The town turned out to fight for me—that held me.

I trusted the brook barrier, but feared

The road would fail; and on that side the fire

Died not without a noise of crackling wood—

Of something more than tinder-grass and weed—

That brought me to my feet to hold it back

By leaning back myself, as if the reins

Were round my neck and I was at the plough.

I won! But I’m sure no one ever spread

Another color over a tenth the space

That I spread coal-black over in the time

It took me. Neighbors coming home from town

Couldn’t believe that so much black had come there

While they had backs turned, that it hadn’t been there

When they had passed an hour or so before

Going the other way and they not seen it.

They looked about for someone to have done it.

But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering

Where all my weariness had gone and why

I walked so light on air in heavy shoes

In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling.

Why wouldn’t I be scared remembering that?”

“If it scares you, what will it do to us?”

“Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared,

What would you say to war if it should come?

That’s what for reasons I should like to know—

If you can comfort me by any answer.”

“Oh, but war’s not for children—it’s for men.”

“Now we are digging almost down to China.

My dears, my dears, you thought that—we all thought it.

So your mistake was ours. Haven’t you heard, though,

About the ships where war has found them out

At sea, about the towns where war has come

Through opening clouds at night with droning speed

Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,—

And children in the ships and in the towns?

Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?

Nothing so new—something we had forgotten:

War is for everyone, for children too.

I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.

The best way is to come up hill with me

And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”

A neighbor of mine in the village

Likes to tell how one spring

When she was a girl on the farm, she did

A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father

To give her a garden plot

To plant and tend and reap herself,

And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner

He thought of an idle bit

Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,

And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you

An ideal one-girl farm,

And give you a chance to put some strength

On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,

Her father said, to plough;

So she had to work it all by hand,

But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow

Along a stretch of road;

But she always ran away and left

Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.

And then she begged the seed.

She says she thinks she planted one

Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,

Radishes, lettuce, peas,

Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,

And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted

That a cider apple tree

In bearing there to-day is hers,

Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany

When all was said and done,

A little bit of everything,

A great deal of none.

Now
when she sees in the village

How village things go,

Just when it seems to come in right,

She says, “
I
know!

It’s as when I was a farmer——”

Oh, never by way of advice!

And she never sins by telling the tale

To the same person twice.

You were forever finding some new play.

So when I saw you down on hands and knees

I the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,

Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,

I went to show you how to make it stay,

If that was your idea, against the breeze,

And, if you asked me, even help pretend

To make it root again and grow afresh.

But ’twas no make-believe with you today,

Nor was the grass itself your real concern,

Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,

Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clovers.

’Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground

The cutter-bar had just gone champing over

(Miraculously without tasking flesh)

And left defenseless to the heat and light.

You wanted to restore them to their right

Of something interposed between their sight

And too much world at once—could means be found.