letters/poetry/frost_selected_poems.json

[
  {
    "title": "The Pasture",
    "body": "I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;\nI'll only stop to rake the leaves away\n(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):\nI shan't be gone long.—-You come too.\n\nI'm going out to fetch the little calf\nThat's standing by the mother. It's so young,\nIt totters when she licks it with her tongue.\nI shan't be gone long.—-You come too.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Cow In Apple-Time",
    "body": "Something inspires the only cow of late\nTo make no more of a wall than an open gate,\nAnd think no more of wall-builders than fools.\nHer face is flecked with pomace and she drools\nA cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,\nShe scorns a pasture withering to the root.\nShe runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten\nThe windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.\nShe leaves them bitten when she has to fly.\nShe bellows on a knoll against the sky.\nHer udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Runaway",
    "body": "Once when the snow of the year was beginning to\nfall,\nWe stopped by a mountain pasture to say \"Whose\ncolt?\"\nA little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,\nThe other curled at his breast. He dipped his head\nAnd snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.\nWe heard the miniature thunder where he fled,\nAnd we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and\ngrey,\nLike a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.\n\"I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.\nHe isn't winter-broken. It isn't play\nWith the little fellow at all. He's running away.\nI doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,\nIt's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!\nWhere is his mother? He can't be out alone.\"\nAnd now he comes again with a clatter of stone\nAnd mounts the wall again with whited eyes\nAnd all his tail that isn't hair up straight.\nHe shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.\n\"Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,\nWhen other creatures have gone to stall and bin,\nOught to be told to come and take him in.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "An Old Man'S Winter Night",
    "body": "All out of doors looked darkly in at him\nThrough the thin frost, almost in separate stars,\nThat gathers on the pane in empty rooms.\nWhat kept his eyes from giving back the gaze\nWas the lamp tilted near them in his hand.\nWhat kept him from remembering what it was\nThat brought him to that creaking room was age.\nHe stood with barrels round him—-at a loss.\nAnd having scared the cellar under him\nIn clomping there, he scared it once again\nIn clomping off;—-and scared the outer night,\nWhich has its sounds, familiar, like the roar\nOf trees and crack of branches, common things,\nBut nothing so like beating on a box.\nA light he was to no one but himself\nWhere now he sat, concerned with he knew what,\nA quiet light, and then not even that.\nHe consigned to the moon, such as she was,\nSo late-arising, to the broken moon\nAs better than the sun in any case\nFor such a charge, his snow upon the roof,\nHis icicles along the wall to keep;\nAnd slept. The log that shifted with a jolt\nOnce in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,\nAnd eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.\nOne aged man—-one man—-can't keep a house,\nA farm, a countryside, or if he can,\nIt's thus he does it of a winter night.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Home Burial",
    "body": "He saw her from the bottom of the stairs\nBefore she saw him. She was starting down,\nLooking back over her shoulder at some fear.\nShe took a doubtful step and then undid it\nTo raise herself and look again. He spoke\nAdvancing toward her: \"What is it you see\nFrom up there always—-for I want to know.\"\nShe turned and sank upon her skirts at that,\nAnd her face changed from terrified to dull.\nHe said to gain time: \"What is it you see?\"\nMounting until she cowered under him.\n\"I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.\"\nShe, in her place, refused him any help\nWith the least stiffening of her neck and silence.\nShe let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,\nBlind creature; and a while he didn't see.\nBut at last he murmured, \"Oh,\" and again, \"Oh.\"\n\n\"What is it—what?\" she said.\n\"Just that I see.\"\n\n\"You don't,\" she challenged. \"Tell me what it is.\"\n\n\"The wonder is I didn't see at once.\nI never noticed it from here before.\nI must be wonted to it—-that's the reason.\nThe little graveyard where my people are!\nSo small the window frames the whole of it.\nNot so much larger than a bedroom, is it?\nThere are three stones of slate and one of marble,\nBroad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight\nOn the sidehill. We haven't to mind _those._\nBut I understand: it is not the stones,\nBut the child's mound----\"\n\nDon't, don't, don't, don't,\" she cried.\n\nShe withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm\nThat rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;\nAnd turned on him with such a daunting look,\nHe said twice over before he knew himself:\n\"Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?\"\n\n\"Not you! Oh, where's my hat? Oh, I don't\nneed it!\nI must get out of here. I must get air.\nI don't know rightly whether any man can.\"\n\n\"Amy! Don't go to someone else this time.\nListen to me. I won't come down the stairs.\"\nHe sat and fixed his chin between his fists.\n\"There's something I should like to ask you, dear.\"\n\n\"You don't know how to ask it.\"\n\n\"Help me, then.\"\n\nHer fingers moved the latch for all reply.\n\n\"My words are nearly always an offence.\nI don't know how to speak of anything\nSo as to please you. But I might be taught\nI should suppose. I can't say I see how.\nA man must partly give up being a man\nWith women-folk. We could have some\narrangement\nBy which I'd bind myself to keep hands off\nAnything special you're a-mind to name.\nThough I don't like such things 'twixt those that\nlove.\nTwo that don't love can't live together without\nthem.\nBut two that do can't live together with them.\"\nShe moved the latch a little. \"Don't—-don't go.\nDon't carry it to someone else this time.\nTell me about it if it's something human.\nLet me into your grief. I'm not so much\nUnlike other folks as your standing there\nApart would make me out. Give me my chance.\nI do think, though, you overdo it a little.\nWhat was it brought you up to think it the thing\nTo take your mother-loss of a first child\nSo inconsolably—in the face of love.\nYou'd think his memory might be satisfied----\"\n\n\"There you go sneering now!\"\n\n\"I'm not, I'm not!\nYou make me angry. I'll come down to you.\nGod, what a woman! And it's come to this,\nA man can't speak of his own child that's dead.\"\n\"You can't because you don't know how.\nIf you had any feelings, you that dug\nWith your own hand—-how could you?—-his little\ngrave;\nI saw you from that very window there,\nMaking the gravel leap and leap in air,\nLeap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly\nAnd roll back down the mound beside the hole.\nI thought, Who is that man? I didn't know you.\nAnd I crept down the stairs and up the stairs\nTo look again, and still your spade kept lifting.\nThen you came in. I heard your rumbling voice\nOut in the kitchen, and I don't know why,\nBut I went near to see with my own eyes.\nYou could sit there with the stains on your shoes\nOf the fresh earth from your own baby's grave\nAnd talk about your everyday concerns.\nYou had stood the spade up against the wall\nOutside there in the entry, for I saw it.\"\n\n\"I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.\nI'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed.\"\n\"I can repeat the very words you were saying.\n\n'Three foggy mornings and one rainy day\nWill rot the best birch fence a man can build.'\nThink of it, talk like that at such a time!\nWhat had how long it takes a birch to rot\nTo do with what was in the darkened parlour?\nYou _couldn't_ care! The nearest friends can go\nWith anyone to death, comes so far short\nThey might as well not try to go at all.\nNo, from the time when one is sick to death,\nOne is alone, and he dies more alone.\nFriends make pretence of following to the grave,\nBut before one is in it, their minds are turned\nAnd making the best of their way back to life\nAnd living people, and things they understand.\nBut the world's evil. I won't have grief so\nIf I can change it. Oh, I won't, I won't!\"\n\n\"There, you have said it all and you feel better.\nYou won't go now. You're crying. Close the door.\nThe heart's gone out of it: why keep it up?\nAmy! There's someone coming down the road!\"\n\n\"_You_-—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—-\nSomewhere out of this house. How can I make\nyou----\"\n\n\"If—-you—-do!\" She was opening the door wider.\n\"Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.\nI'll follow and bring you back by force. I _will!_—-\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Death Of The Hired Man",
    "body": "Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table\nWaiting for Warren. When she heard his step,\nShe ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage\nTo meet him in the doorway with the news\nAnd put him on his guard. \"Silas is back.\"\n\nShe pushed him outward with her through the door\nAnd shut it after her. \"Be kind,\" she said.\nShe took the market things from Warren's arms\nAnd set them on the porch, then drew him down\nTo sit beside her on the wooden steps.\n\n\"When was I ever anything but kind to him?\nBut I'll not have the fellow back,\" he said.\n\"I told him so last haying, didn't I?\n'If he left then,' I said, 'that ended it.'\nWhat good is he? Who else will harbour him\nAt his age for the little he can do?\nWhat help he is there's no depending on.\nOff he goes always when I need him most.\n\n'He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,\nEnough at least to buy tobacco with,\nSo he won't have to beg and be beholden.'\n'All right,' I say, 'I can't afford to pay\nAny fixed wages, though I wish I could.'\n'Someone else can.' 'Then someone else will have\nto.'\nI shouldn't mind his bettering himself\nIf that was what it was. You can be certain,\nWhen he begins like that, there's someone at him\nTrying to coax him off with pocket-money,—-\nIn haying time, when any help is scarce.\nIn winter he comes back to us. I'm done.\"\n\n\"Sh! not so loud: he'll hear you,\" Mary said.\n\n\"I want him to: he'll have to soon or late.\"\n\n\"He's worn out. He's asleep beside the stove.\nWhen I came up from Rowe's I found him here,\nHuddled against the barn-door fast asleep,\nA miserable sight, and frightening, too—-\nYou needn't smile—-I didn't recognise him—-\nI wasn't looking for him—-and he's changed.\nWait till you see.\"\n\n\"Where did you say he'd been?\"\n\n\"He didn't say. I dragged him to the house,\nAnd gave him tea and tried to make him smoke.\nI tried to make him talk about his travels.\nNothing would do: he just kept nodding off.\"\n\n\"What did he say? Did he say anything?\"\n\n\"But little.\"\n\n\"Anything? Mary, confess\nHe said he'd come to ditch the meadow for me.\"\n\n\"Warren!\"\n\n\"But did he? I just want to know.\"\n\n\"Of course he did. What would you have him say?\nSurely you wouldn't grudge the poor old man\nSome humble way to save his self-respect.\nHe added, if you really care to know,\nHe meant to clear the upper pasture, too.\nThat sounds like something you have heard before?\nWarren, I wish you could have heard the way\nHe jumbled everything. I stopped to look\nTwo or three times—-he made me feel so queer—-\nTo see if he was talking in his sleep.\nHe ran on Harold Wilson—-you remember—-\nThe boy you had in haying four years since.\nHe's finished school, and teaching in his college.\nSilas declares you'll have to get him back.\nHe says they two will make a team for work:\nBetween them they will lay this farm as smooth!\nThe way he mixed that in with other things.\nHe thinks young Wilson a likely lad, though daft\nOn education—-you know how they fought\nAll through July under the blazing sun,\nSilas up on the cart to build the load,\nHarold along beside to pitch it on.\"\n\n\"Yes, I took care to keep well out of earshot.\"\n\n\"Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream.\nYou wouldn't think they would. How some things\nlinger!\nHarold's young college boy's assurance piqued him.\nAfter so many years he still keeps finding\nGood arguments he sees he might have used.\nI sympathise. I know just how it feels\nTo think of the right thing to say too late.\nHarold's associated in his mind with Latin.\nHe asked me what I thought of Harold's saying\nHe studied Latin like the violin\nBecause he liked it—-that an argument!\nHe said he couldn't make the boy believe\nHe could find water with a hazel prong—-\nWhich showed how much good school had ever done\nhim.\nHe wanted to go over that. But most of all\nHe thinks if he could have another chance\nTo teach him how to build a load of hay----\"\n\n\"I know, that's Silas' one accomplishment.\nHe bundles every forkful in its place,\nAnd tags and numbers it for future reference,\nSo he can find and easily dislodge it\nIn the unloading. Silas does that well.\nHe takes it out in bunches like big birds' nests.\nYou never see him standing on the hay\nHe's trying to lift, straining to lift himself.\"\n\n\"He thinks if he could teach him that, he'd be\nSome good perhaps to someone in the world.\nHe hates to see a boy the fool of books.\nPoor Silas, so concerned for other folk,\nAnd nothing to look backward to with pride,\nAnd nothing to look forward to with hope,\nSo now and never any different.\"\n\nPart of a moon was falling down the west,\nDragging the whole sky with it to the hills.\nIts light poured softly in her lap. She saw\nAnd spread her apron to it. She put out her hand\nAmong the harp-like morning-glory strings,\nTaut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,\nAs if she played unheard the tenderness\nThat wrought on him beside her in the night.\n\"Warren,\" she said, \"he has come home to die:\nYou needn't be afraid he'll leave you this time.\"\n\n\"Home,\" he mocked gently.\n\n\"Yes, what else but home?\n\nIt all depends on what you mean by home.\nOf course he's nothing to us, any more\nThan was the hound that came a stranger to us\nOut of the woods, worn out upon the trail.\"\n\n\"Home is the place where, when you have to go\nthere,\nThey have to take you in.\"\n\n\"I should have called it\nSomething you somehow haven't to deserve.\"\n\nWarren leaned out and took a step or two,\nPicked up a little stick, and brought it back\nAnd broke it in his hand and tossed it by.\n\"Silas has better claim on us, you think,\nThan on his brother? Thirteen little miles\nAs the road winds would bring him to his door.\nSilas has walked that far no doubt to-day.\nWhy didn't he go there? His brother's rich,\nA somebody—-director in the bank.\"\n\n\"He never told us that.\"\n\n\"We know it though.\"\n\n\"I think his brother ought to help, of course.\nI'll see to that if there is need. He ought of right\nTo take him in, and might be willing to—-\nHe may be better than appearances.\nBut have some pity on Silas. Do you think\nIf he'd had any pride in claiming kin\nOr anything he looked for from his brother,\nHe'd keep so still about him all this time?\"\n\n\"I wonder what's between them.\"\n\n\"I can tell you.\nSilas is what he is—-we wouldn't mind him—-\nBut just the kind that kinsfolk can't abide.\nHe never did a thing so very bad.\nHe don't know why he isn't quite as good\nAs anyone. He won't be made ashamed\nTo please his brother, worthless though he is.\"\n\n\"_I_ can't think Si ever hurt anyone.\"\n\n\"No, but he hurt my heart the way he lay\nAnd rolled his old head on that sharp-edged\nchair-back.\nHe wouldn't let me put him on the lounge.\nYou must go in and see what you can do.\nI made the bed up for him there to-night.\nYou'll be surprised at him—-how much he's broken.\nHis working days are done; I'm sure of it.\"\n\n\"I'd not be in a hurry to say that.\"\n\n\"I haven't been. Go, look, see for yourself.\nBut, Warren, please remember how it is:\nHe's come to help you ditch the meadow.\nHe has a plan. You mustn't laugh at him.\nHe may not speak of it, and then he may.\nI'll sit and see if that small sailing cloud\nWill hit or miss the moon.\"\n\nIt hit the moon.\nThen there were three there, making a dim row,\nThe moon, the little silver cloud, and she.\n\nWarren returned—-too soon, it seemed to her,\nSlipped to her side, caught up her hand and waited.\n\n\"Warren,\" she questioned.\n\n\"Dead,\" was all he answered.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Servant To Servants",
    "body": "I didn't make you know how glad I was\nTo have you come and camp here on our land.\nI promised myself to get down some day\nAnd see the way you lived, but I don't know!\nWith a houseful of hungry men to feed\nI guess you'd find. ... It seems to me\nI can't express my feelings any more\nThan I can raise my voice or want to lift\nMy hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to).\nDid ever you feel so? I hope you never.\nIt's got so I don't even know for sure\nWhether I _am_ glad, sorry, or anything.\nThere's nothing but a voice-like left inside\nThat seems to tell me how I ought to feel,\nAnd would feel if I wasn't all gone wrong.\nYou take the lake. I look and look at it.\nI see it's a fair, pretty sheet of water.\nI stand and make myself repeat out loud\nThe advantages it has, so long and narrow,\nLike a deep piece of some old running river\nCut short off at both ends. It lies five miles\nStraight away through the mountain notch\nFrom the sink window where I wash the plates,\nAnd all our storms come up toward the house,\nDrawing the slow waves whiter and whiter and\nwhiter.\nIt took my mind off doughnuts and soda biscuit\nTo step outdoors and take the water dazzle\nA sunny morning, or take the rising wind\nAbout my face and body and through my wrapper,\nWhen a storm threatened from the Dragon's Den,\nAnd a cold chill shivered across the lake.\nI see it's a fair, pretty sheet of water,\nOur Willoughby! How did you hear of it?\nI expect, though, everyone's heard of it.\nIn a book about ferns? Listen to that!\nYou let things more like feathers regulate\nYour going and coming. And you like it here?\nI can see how you might. But I don't know!\nIt would be different if more people came,\nFor then there would be business. As it is,\nThe cottages Len built, sometimes we rent them,\nSometimes we don't. We've a good piece of shore\nThat ought to be worth something, and may yet.\nBut I don't count on it as much as Len.\nHe looks on the bright side of everything,\nIncluding me. He thinks I'll be all right\nWith doctoring. But it's not medicine—-\nLowe is the only doctor's dared to say so—-\nIt's rest I want—-there, I have said it out—-\nFrom cooking meals for hungry hired men\nAnd washing dishes after them—-from doing\nThings over and over that just won't stay done.\nBy good rights I ought not to have so much\nPut on me, but there seems no other way.\nLen says one steady pull more ought to do it.\nHe says the best way out is always through.\nAnd I agree to that, or in so far\nAs that I can see no way out but through—-\nLeastways for me—-and then they'll be convinced.\nIt's not that Len don't want the best for me.\nIt was his plan our moving over in\nBeside the lake from where that day I showed you\nWe used to live—-ten miles from anywhere\nWe didn't change without some sacrifice,\nBut Len went at it to make up the loss.\nHis work's a man's, of course, from sun to sun,\nBut he works when he works as hard as I do—-\nThough there's small profit in comparisons.\n(Women and men will make them all the same.)\nBut work ain't all. Len undertakes too much.\nHe's into everything in town. This year\nIt's highways, and he's got too many men\nAround him to look after that make waste.\nThey take advantage of him shamefully,\nAnd proud, too, of themselves for doing so.\nWe have four here to board, great good-for-nothings,\nSprawling about the kitchen with their talk\nWhile I fry their bacon. Much they care!\nNo more put out in what they do or say\nThan if I wasn't in the room at all.\nComing and going all the time, they are:\nI don't learn what their names are, let alone\nTheir characters, or whether they are safe\nTo have inside the house with doors unlocked.\nI'm not afraid of them, though, if they're not\nAfraid of me. There's two can play at that.\nI have my fancies: it runs in the family.\nMy father's brother wasn't right. They kept him\nLocked up for years back there at the old farm.\nI've been away once—-yes, I've been away.\nThe State Asylum. I was prejudiced;\nI wouldn't have sent anyone of mine there;\nYou know the old idea—-the only asylum\nWas the poorhouse, and those who could afford,\nRather than send their folks to such a place,\nKept them at home; and it does seem more human.\nBut it's not so: the place is the asylum.\nThere they have every means proper to do with,\nAnd you aren't darkening other people's lives—-\nWorse than no good to them, and they no good\nTo you in your condition; you can't know\nAffection or the want of it in that state.\nI've heard too much of the old-fashioned way.\nMy father's brother, he went mad quite young.\nSome thought he had been bitten by a dog,\nBecause his violence took on the form\nOf carrying his pillow in his teeth;\nBut it's more likely he was crossed in love,\nOr so the story goes. It was some girl.\nAnyway, all he talked about was love.\nThey soon saw he would do someone a mischief\nIf he wa'n't kept strict watch of, and it ended\nIn father's building him a sort of cage,\nOr room within a room, of hickory poles,\nLike stanchions in the barn, from floor to ceiling,—-\nA narrow passage all the way around.\nAnything they put in for furniture\nHe'd tear to pieces, even a bed to lie on.\nSo they made the place comfortable with straw,\nLike a beast's stall, to ease their consciences.\nOf course they had to feed him without dishes.\nThey tried to keep him clothed, but he paraded\nWith his clothes on his arm—-all of his clothes.\nCruel—-it sounds. I s'pose they did the best\nThey knew. And just when he was at the height,\nFather and mother married, and mother came,\nA bride, to help take care of such a creature,\nAnd accommodate her young life to his.\nThat was what marrying father meant to her.\nShe had to lie and hear love things made dreadful\nBy his shouts in the night. He'd shout and shout\nUntil the strength was shouted out of him,\nAnd his voice died down slowly from exhaustion.\nHe'd pull his bars apart like bow and bow-string,\nAnd let them go and make them twang until\nHis hands had worn them smooth as any ox-bow.\nAnd then he'd crow as if he thought that child's\nplay—-\nThe only fun he had. I've heard them say, though,\nThey found a way to put a stop to it.\nHe was before my time—-I never saw him;\nBut the pen stayed exactly as it was\nThere in the upper chamber in the ell,\nA sort of catch-all full of attic clutter.\nI often think of the smooth hickory bars.\nIt got so I would say--you know, half fooling—-\n\"It's time I took my turn upstairs in jail\"—-\nJust as you will till it becomes a habit.\nNo wonder I was glad to get away.\nMind you, I waited till Len said the word.\nI didn't want the blame if things went wrong.\nI was glad though, no end, when we moved out,\nAnd I looked to be happy, and I was,\nAs I said, for a while—-but I don't know!\nSomehow the change wore out like a prescription.\nAnd there's more to it than just window-views\nAnd living by a lake. I'm past such help—-\nUnless Len took the notion, which he won't,\nAnd I won't ask him—-it's not sure enough.\nI 'spose I've got to go the road I'm going:\nOther folks have to, and why shouldn't I?\nI almost think if I could do like you,\nDrop everything and live out on the ground—-\nBut it might be, come night, I shouldn't like it,\nOr a long rain. I should soon get enough,\nAnd be glad of a good roof overhead.\nI've lain awake thinking of you, I'll warrant,\nMore than you have yourself, some of these nights.\nThe wonder was the tents weren't snatched away\nFrom over you as you lay in your beds.\nI haven't courage for a risk like that.\nBless you, of course, you're keeping me from work,\nBut the thing of it is, I need to _be_ kept.\nThere's work enough to do—-there's always that;\nBut behind's behind. The worst that you can do\nIs set me back a little more behind.\nI shan't catch up in this world, anyway.\nI'd rather you'd not go unless you must.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Self-Seeker",
    "body": "\"Willis, I didn't want you here to-day:\nThe lawyer's coming for the company.\nI'm going to sell my soul, or, rather, feet.\nFive hundred dollars for the pair, you know.\"\n\n\"With you the feet have nearly been the soul;\nAnd if you're going to sell them to the devil,\nI want to see you do it. When's he coming?\"\n\n\"I half suspect you knew, and came on purpose\nTo try to help me drive a better bargain.\"\n\n\"Well, if it's true! Yours are no common feet.\nThe lawyer don't know what it is he's buying:\nSo many miles you might have walked you won't\nwalk.\nYou haven't run your forty orchids down.\nWhat does he think?—-How _are_ the blessed feet?\nThe doctor's sure you're going to walk again?\"\n\n\"He thinks I'll hobble. It's both legs and feet.\"\n\n\"They must be terrible—-I mean to look at.\"\n\n\"I haven't dared to look at them uncovered.\nThrough the bed blankets I remind myself\nOf a starfish laid out with rigid points.\"\n\n\"The wonder is it hadn't been your head.\"\n\n\"It's hard to tell you how I managed it.\nWhen I saw the shaft had me by the coat,\nI didn't try too long to pull away,\nOr fumble for my knife to cut away,\nI just embraced the shaft and rode it out—-\nTill Weiss shut off the water in the wheel-pit.\nThat's how I think I didn't lose my head,\nBut my legs got their knocks against the ceiling.\"\n\n\"Awful. Why didn't they throw off the belt\nInstead of going clear down in the wheel-pit?\"\n\n\"They say sometime was wasted on the belt—-\nOld streak of leather—doesn't love me much\nBecause I made him spit fire at my knuckles,\nThe way Ben Franklin used to make the kite-string.\nThat must be it. Some days he won't stay on.\nThat day a woman couldn't coax him off.\nHe's on his rounds now with his tail in his mouth\nSnatched right and left across the silver pulleys.\nEverything goes the same without me there.\nYou can hear the small buzz saws whine, the big saw\nCaterwaul to the hills around the village\nAs they both bite the wood. It's all our music.\nOne ought as a good villager to like it.\nNo doubt it has a sort of prosperous sound,\nAnd it's our life.\"\n\n\"Yes, when it's not our death.\"\n\n\"You make that sound as if it wasn't so\nWith everything. What we live by we die by.\nI wonder where my lawyer is. His train's in.\nI want this over with; I'm hot and tired.\"\n\n\"You're getting ready to do something foolish.\"\n\n\"Watch for him, will you, Will? You let him in.\nI'd rather Mrs. Corbin didn't know;\nI've boarded here so long, she thinks she owns me.\nYou're bad enough to manage without her.\"\n\n\"And I'm going to be worse instead of better.\nYou've got to tell me how far this is gone:\nHave you agreed to any price?\"\n\n\"Five hundred.\nFive hundred—-five—-five! One, two, three, four,\nfive.\nYou needn't look at me.\"\n\n\"I don't believe you.\"\n\n\"I told you, Willis, when you first came in.\nDon't you be hard on me. I have to take\nWhat I can get. You see they have the feet,\nWhich gives them the advantage in the trade.\nI can't get back the feet in any case.\"\n\n\"But your flowers, man, you're selling out your\nflowers.\"\n\n\"Yes, that's one way to put it—-all the flowers\nOf every kind everywhere in this region\nFor the next forty summers—-call it forty.\nBut I'm not selling those, I'm giving them,\nThey never earned me so much as one cent:\nMoney can't pay me for the loss of them.\nNo, the five hundred was the sum they named\nTo pay the doctor's bill and tide me over.\nIt's that or fight, and I don't want to fight—-\nI just want to get settled in my life,\nSuch as it's going to be, and know the worst,\nOr best—-it may not be so bad. The firm\nPromise me all the shooks I want to nail.\"\n\n\"But what about your flora of the valley?\"\n\n\"You have me there. But that—-you didn't think\nThat was worth money to me? Still, I own\nIt goes against me not to finish it\nFor the friends it might bring me. By the way,\nI had a letter from Burroughs—-did I tell you?—-\nAbout my _Cyprepedium reginœ_;\nHe says it's not reported so far north.\nThere! there's the bell. He's rung. But you go\ndown\nAnd bring him up, and don't let Mrs. Corbin.—-\nOh, well, we'll soon be through with it. I'm tired.\"\n\nWillis brought up besides the Boston lawyer\nA little barefoot girl who in the noise\nOf heavy footsteps in the old frame house,\nAnd baritone importance of the lawyer,\nStood for a while unnoticed with her hands\nShyly behind her.\n\n\"Well, and how is Mister---\"\nThe lawyer was already in his satchel\nAs if for papers that might bear the name\nHe hadn't at command. \"You must excuse me,\nI dropped in at the mill and was detained.\"\n\n\"Looking round, I suppose,\" said Willis.\n\nWell, yes.\"\n\"Yes,\n\n\"Hear anything that might prove useful?\"\n\nThe Broken One saw Anne. \"Why, here is Anne\nWhat do you want, dear? Come, stand by the bed;\nTell me what is it?\" Anne just wagged her dress\nWith both hands held behind her. \"Guess,\" she\nsaid.\n\n\"Oh, guess which hand? My, my! Once on a\ntime\nI knew a lovely way to tell for certain\nBy looking in the ears. But I forget it.\nEr, let me see. I think 111 take the right.\nThat's sure to be right even if it's wrong.\nCome, hold it out. Don't change.—-A Ram's Horn\norchid!\nA Ram's Horn! What would I have got, I wonder,\nIf I had chosen left. Hold out the left.\nAnother Ram's Horn! Where did you find those,\nUnder what beech tree, on what woodchuck's knoll?\"\n\nAnne looked at the large lawyer at her side,\nAnd thought she wouldn't venture on so much.\n\n\"Were there no others?\"\n\n\"There were four or five.\nI knew you wouldn't let me pick them all.\"\n\n\"I wouldn't—-so I wouldn't. You're the girl!\nYou see Anne has her lesson learned by heart.\"\n\n\"I wanted there should be some there next year.\"\n\n\"Of course you did. You left the rest for seed,\nAnd for the backwoods woodchuck. You're the girl!\nA Ram's Horn orchid seedpod for a woodchuck\nSounds something like. Better than farmer's beans\nTo a discriminating appetite,\nThough the Ram's Horn is seldom to be had\nIn bushel lots—-doesn't come on the market.\nBut, Anne, I'm troubled; have you told me all?\nYou're hiding something. That's as bad as lying.\nYou ask this lawyer man. And it's not safe\nWith a lawyer at hand to find you out.\nNothing is hidden from some people, Anne.\nYou don't tell me that where you found a Ram's\nHorn\nYou didn't find a Yellow Lady's Slipper.\nWhat did I tell you? What? I'd blush, I would.\nDon't you defend yourself. If it was there,\nWhere is it now, the Yellow Lady's Slipper?\"\n\n\"Well, wait—it's common—-it's too _common._\"\n\n\"Common?\nThe Purple Lady's Slipper's commoner.\"\n\n\"I didn't bring a Purple Lady's Slipper\nTo _You_-—to you I mean—-they're both too\ncommon.\"\n\nThe lawyer gave a laugh among his papers\nAs if with some idea that she had scored.\n\n\"I've broken Anne of gathering bouquets.\nIt's not fair to the child. It can't be helped\nthough:\nPressed into service means pressed out of shape.\nSomehow I'll make it right with her—-she'll see.\nShe's going to do my scouting in the field,\nOver stone walls and all along a wood\nAnd by a river bank for water flowers,\nThe floating Heart, with small leaf like a heart,\nAnd at the _sinus_ under water a fist\nOf little fingers all kept down but one,\nAnd that thrust up to blossom in the sun\nAs if to say 'You! You're the Heart's desire.'\nAnne has a way with flowers to take the place\nOf that she's lost: she goes down on one knee\nAnd lifts their faces by the chin to hers\nAnd says their names, and leaves them where they\nare.\"\n\nThe lawyer wore a watch the case of which\nWas cunningly devised to make a noise\nLike a small pistol when he snapped it shut\nAt such a time as this. He snapped it now.\n\n\"Well, Anne, go, dearie. Our affair will wait.\nThe lawyer man is thinking of his train.\nHe wants to give me lots and lots of money\nBefore he goes, because I hurt myself,\nAnd it may take him I don't know how long.\nBut put our flowers in water first. Will, help her:\nThe pitcher's too full for her. There's no cup?\nJust hook them on the inside of the pitcher.\nNow run.—-Get out your documents! You see\nI have to keep on the good side of Anne.\nI'm a great boy to think of number one.\nAnd you can't blame me in the place I'm in.\nWho will take care of my necessities\nUnless I do?\"\n\n\"A pretty interlude,\"\nThe lawyer said: \"I'm sorry, but my train----\nLuckily terms are all agreed upon.\nYou only have to sign your name. Right—-there.\"\n\n\"You, Will, stop making faces. Come round here\nWhere you can't make them. What is it you want?\nI'll put you out with Anne. Be good or go.\"\n\n\"You don't mean you will sign that thing unread?\"\n\n\"Make yourself useful then, and read it for me.\nIsn't it something I have seen before?\"\n\n\"You'll find it is. Let your friend look at it.\"\n\n\"Yes, but all that takes time, and I'm as much\nIn haste to get it over with as you.\nBut read it, read it. That's right, draw the curtain:\nHalf the time I don't know what's troubling me.—-\nWhat do you say, Will? Don't you be a fool.\nYou! crumpling folkses' legal documents.\nOut with it if you've any real objection.\"\n\n\"Five hundred dollars!\"\n\n\"What would you think right?\"\n\n\"A thousand wouldn't be a cent too much;\nYou know it, Mr. Lawyer. The sin is\nAccepting anything before he knows\nWhether he's ever going to walk again.\nIt smells to me like a dishonest trick.\"\n\n\"I think—-I think—-from what I heard to-day—-\nAnd saw myself—-he would be ill-advised----\"\n\n\"What did you hear, for instance?\" Willis said.\n\n\"Now the place where the accident occurred----\"\n\nThe Broken One was twisted in his bed.\n\"This is between you two apparently.\nWhere I come in is what I want to know.\nYou stand up to it like a pair of cocks.\nGo outdoors if you want to fight. Spare me.\nWhen you come back, I'll have the papers signed.\nWill pencil do? Then, please, your fountain pen.\nOne of you hold my head up from the pillow.\"\n\nWillis flung off the bed. \"I wash my hands—-\nI'm no match—-no, and don't pretend to be----\"\n\nThe lawyer gravely capped his fountain pen.\n\"You're doing the wise thing: you won't regret it.\nWe're very sorry for you.\"\n\nWillis sneered:\n\"Who's _we?_—-some stockholders in Boston?\nI'll go outdoors, by gad! and won't come back.\"\n\n\"Willis, bring Anne back with you when you come.\nYes. Thanks for caring. Don't mind Will: he's\nsavage.\nHe thinks you ought to pay me for my flowers.\nYou don't know what I mean about the flowers.\nDon't stop to try now. You'll miss your train.\nGood-bye.\" He flung his arms around his face.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Loneliness",
    "body": "(_Her Word_)\n\n\nOne ought not to have to care\nSo much as you and I\nCare when the birds come round the house\nTo seem to say good-bye;\n\nOr care so much when they come back\nWith whatever it is they sing;\nThe truth being we are as much\nToo glad for the one thing\n\nAs we are too sad for the other here—-\nWith birds that fill their breasts\nBut with each other and themselves\nAnd their built or driven nests.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "House Fear",
    "body": "Always—-I tell you this they learned—-\nAlways at night when they returned\nTo the lonely house from far away\nTo lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,\nThey learned to rattle the lock and key\nTo give whatever might chance to be\nWarning and time to be off in flight:\nAnd preferring the out- to the in-door night,\nThey learned to leave the house-door wide\nUntil they had lit the lamp inside.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Smile",
    "body": "(_Her Word_)\n\n\nI didn't like the way he went away.\nThat smile! It never came of being gay.\nStill, he smiled—-did you see him?—-I was sure!\nPerhaps because we gave him only bread\nAnd the wretch knew from that that we were poor.\nPerhaps because he let us give instead\nOf seizing from us as he might have seized.\nPerhaps he mocked at us for being wed,\nOr being very young (and he was pleased\nTo have a vision of us old and dead).\nI wonder how far down the road he's got.\nHe's watching from the woods as like as not.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Oft-Repeated Dream",
    "body": "She had no saying dark enough\nFor the dark pine that kept\nForever trying the window-latch\nOf the room where they slept.\n\nThe tireless but ineffectual hands\nThat with every futile pass\nMade the great tree seem as a little bird\nBefore the mystery of glass!\n\nIt never had been inside the room,\nAnd only one of the two\nWas afraid in an oft-repeated dream\nOf what the tree might do.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Impulse",
    "body": "It was too lonely for her there,\nAnd too wild,\nAnd since there were but two of them,\nAnd no child,\n\nAnd work was little in the house,\nShe was free,\nAnd followed where he furrowed field,\nOr felled tree.\n\nShe rested on a log and tossed\nThe fresh chips,\nWith a song only to herself\nOn her lips.\n\nAnd once she went to break a bough\nOf black alder.\nShe strayed so far she scarcely heard\nWhen he called her—-\n\nAnd didn't answer—-didn't speak—-\nOr return.\nShe stood, and then she ran and hid\nIn the fern.\n\nHe never found her, though he looked\nEverywhere,\nAnd he asked at her mother's house\nWas she there.\n\nSudden and swift and light as that\nThe ties gave,\nAnd he learned of finalities\nBesides the grave.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "\"Out, Out----\"",
    "body": "The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard\nAnd made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of\nwood,\nSweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.\nAnd from there those that lifted eyes could count\nFive mountain ranges one behind the other\nUnder the sunset far into Vermont.\nAnd the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,\nAs it ran light, or had to bear a load.\nAnd nothing happened: day was all but done.\nCall it a day, I wish they might have said\nTo please the boy by giving him the half hour\nThat a boy counts so much when saved from work.\nHis sister stood beside them in her apron\nTo tell them \"Supper.\" At the word, the saw,\nAs if to prove saws knew what supper meant,\nLeaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap—-\nHe must have given the hand. However it was,\nNeither refused the meeting. But the hand!\nThe boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh.\nAs he swung toward them holding up the hand\nHalf in appeal, but half as if to keep\nThe life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—-\nSince he was old enough to know, big boy\nDoing a man's work, though a child at heart—-\nHe saw all spoiled. \"Don't let him cut my hand off—-\nThe doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!\"\nSo. But the hand was gone already.\nThe doctor put him in the dark of ether.\nHe lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.\nAnd then—-the watcher at his pulse took fright.\nNo one believed. They listened at his heart.\nLittle—-less—-nothing!—-and that ended it.\nNo more to build on there. And they, since they\nWere not the one dead, turned to their affairs.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Putting In The Seed",
    "body": "You come to fetch me from my work to-night\nWhen supper's on the table, and we'll see\nIf I can leave off burying the white\nSoft petals fallen from the apple tree\n(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,\nMingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled\npea);\nAnd go along with you ere you lose sight\nOf what you came for and become like me,\nSlave to a springtime passion for the earth.\nHow Love bums through the Putting in the Seed\nOn through the watching for that early birth\nWhen, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,\nThe sturdy seedling with arched body comes\nShouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Going For Water",
    "body": "The well was dry beside the door,\nAnd so we went with pail and can\nAcross the fields behind the house\nTo seek the brook if still it ran;\n\nNot loth to have excuse to go,\nBecause the autumn eve was fair\n(Though chill), because the fields were ours,\nAnd by the brook our woods were there.\n\nWe ran as if to meet the moon\nThat slowly dawned behind the trees,\nThe barren boughs without the leaves,\nWithout the birds, without the breeze.\n\nBut once within the wood, we paused\nLike gnomes that hid us from the moon,\nReady to run to hiding new\nWith laughter when she found us soon.\n\nEach laid on other a staying hand\nTo listen ere we dared to look,\nAnd in the hush we joined to make\nWe heard, we knew we heard the brook.\n\nA note as from a single place,\nA slender tinkling fall that made\nNow drops that floated on the pool\nLike pearls, and now a silver blade.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Mowing",
    "body": "There was never a sound beside the wood but one,\nAnd that was my long scythe whispering to the\nground.\nWhat was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;\nPerhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,\nSomething, perhaps, about the lack of sound—-\nAnd that was why it whispered and did not speak.\nIt was no dream of the gift of idle hours,\nOr easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:\nAnything more than the truth would have seemed\ntoo weak\nTo the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,\nNot without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers\n(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.\nThe fact is the sweetest dream that labour knows.\nMy long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "After Apple-Picking",
    "body": "My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree\nToward heaven still,\nAnd there's a barrel that I didn't fill\nBeside it, and there may be two or three\nApples I didn't pick upon some bough.\nBut I am done with apple-picking now.\nEssence of winter sleep is on the night,\nThe scent of apples: I am drowsing off.\nI cannot rub the strangeness from my sight\nI got from looking through a pane of glass\nI skimmed this morning from the drinking trough\nAnd held against the world of hoary grass.\nIt melted, and I let it fall and break.\nBut I was well\nUpon my way to sleep before it fell,\nAnd I could tell\nWhat form my dreaming was about to take.\nMagnified apples appear and disappear,\nStem end and blossom end,\nAnd every fleck of russet showing clear.\nMy instep arch not only keeps the ache,\nIt keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.\nI feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.\nAnd I keep hearing from the cellar bin\nThe rumbling sound\nOf load on load of apples coming in.\nFor I have had too much\nOf apple-picking: I am overtired\nOf the great harvest I myself desired.\nThere were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,\nCherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.\nFor all\nThat struck the earth,\nNo matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,\nWent surely to the cider-apple heap\nAs of no worth.\nOne can see what will trouble\nThis sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.\nWere he not gone,\nThe woodchuck could say whether it's like his\nLong sleep, as I describe its coming on,\nOr just some human sleep.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Birches",
    "body": "When I see birches bend to left and right\nAcross the lines of straighter darker trees,\nI like to think some boy's been swinging them.\nBut swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.\nIce-storms do that. Often you must have seen them\nLoaded with ice a sunny winter morning\nAfter a rain. They click upon themselves\nAs the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured\nAs the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.\nSoon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal\nshells\nShattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—-\nSuch heaps of broken glass to sweep away\nYou'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.\nThey are dragged to the withered bracken by the\nload,\nAnd they seem not to break; though once they are\nbowed\nSo low for long, they never right themselves:\nYou may see their trunks arching in the woods\nYears afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,\nLike girls on hands and knees that throw their hair\nBefore them over their heads to dry in the sun.\nBut I was going to say when Truth broke in\nWith all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,\nI should prefer to have some boy bend them\nAs he went out and in to fetch the cows—-\nSome boy too far from town to learn baseball,\nWhose only play was what he found himself,\nSummer or winter, and could play alone.\nOne by one he subdued his father's trees\nBy riding them down over and over again\nUntil he took the stiffness out of them,\nAnd not one but hung limp, not one was left\nFor him to conquer. He learned all there was\nTo learn about not launching out too soon\nAnd so not carrying the tree away\nClear to the ground. He always kept his poise\nTo the top branches, climbing carefully\nWith the same pains you use to fill a cup\nUp to the brim, and even above the brim.\nThen he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,\nKicking his way down through the air to the ground.\nSo was I once myself a swinger of birches.\nAnd so I dream of going back to be.\nIt's when I'm weary of considerations,\nAnd life is too much like a pathless wood\nWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs\nBroken across it, and one eye is weeping\nFrom a twig's having lashed across it open.\nI'd like to get away from earth awhile\nAnd then come back to it and begin over.\nMay no fate wilfully misunderstand me\nAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me away\nNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:\nI don't know where it's likely to go better.\nI'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,\nAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunk\n_Toward_ heaven, till the tree could bear no more,\nBut dipped its top and set me down again.\nThat would be good both going and coming back.\nOne could do worse than be a swinger of birches.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Gum-Gatherer",
    "body": "There overtook me and drew me in\nTo his down-hill, early-morning stride,\nAnd set me five miles on my road\nBetter than if he had had me ride,\nA man with a swinging bag for load\nAnd half the bag wound round his hand.\nWe talked like barking above the din\nOf water we walked along beside.\nAnd for my telling him where I'd been\nAnd where I lived in mountain land\nTo be coming home the way I was,\nHe told me a little about himself.\nHe came from higher up in the pass\nWhere the grist of the new-beginning brooks\nIs blocks split off the mountain mass—-\nAnd hopeless grist enough it looks\nEver to grind to soil for grass.\n(The way it is will do for moss.)\nThere he had built his stolen shack.\nIt had to be a stolen shack\nBecause of the fears of fire and loss\nThat trouble the sleep of lumber folk:\nVisions of half the world burned black\nAnd the sun shrunken yellow in smoke.\nWe know who when they come to town\nBring berries under the wagon seat,\nOr a basket of eggs between their feet;\nWhat this man brought in a cotton sack\nWas gum, the gum of the mountain spruce.\nHe showed me lumps of the scented stuff\nLike uncut jewels, dull and rough.\nIt comes to market golden brown;\nBut turns to pink between the teeth.\n\nI told him this is a pleasant life\nTo set your breast to the bark of trees\nThat all your days are dim beneath,\nAnd reaching up with a little knife,\nTo loose the resin and take it down\nAnd bring it to market when you please.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Mountain",
    "body": "The mountain held the town as in a shadow.\nI saw so much before I slept there once:\nI noticed that I missed stars in the west,\nWhere its black body cut into the sky.\nNear me it seemed: I felt it like a wall\nBehind which I was sheltered from a wind.\nAnd yet between the town and it I found,\nWhen I walked forth at dawn to see new things,\nWere fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.\nThe river at the time was fallen away,\nAnd made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;\nBut the signs showed what it had done in spring;\nGood grass-land gullied out, and in the grass\nRidges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.\nI crossed the river and swung round the mountain.\nAnd there I met a man who moved so slow\nWith white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,\nIt seemed no harm to stop him altogether.\n\n\"What town is this?\" I asked.\n\n\"This? Lunenburg.\"\nThen I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,\nBeyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,\nBut only felt at night its shadowy presence.\n\"Where is your village? Very far from here?\"\n\n\"There is no village—-only scattered farms.\nWe were but sixty voters last election.\nWe can't in nature grow to many more:\nThat thing takes all the room!\" He moved his goad.\nThe mountain stood there to be pointed at.\nPasture ran up the side a little way,\nAnd then there was a wall of trees with trunks:\nAfter that only tops of trees, and cliffs\nImperfectly concealed among the leaves.\nA dry ravine emerged from under boughs\nInto the pasture.\n\n\"That looks like a path.\nIs that the way to reach the top from here?—-\nNot for this morning, but some other time:\nI must be getting back to breakfast now.\"\n\n\"I don't advise your trying from this side.\nThere is no proper path, but those that _have_\nBeen up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd's.\nThat's five miles back. You can't mistake the place:\nThey logged it there last winter some way up.\nI'd take you, but I'm bound the other way.\"\n\n\"You've never climbed it?\"\n\n\"I've been on the sides\nDeer-hunting and trout-fishing. There's a brook\nThat starts up on it somewhere—-I've heard say\nRight on the top, tip-top—-a curious thing.\nBut what would interest you about the brook,\nIt's always cold in summer, warm in winter.\nOne of the great sights going is to see\nIt steam in winter like an ox's breath.\nUntil the bushes all along its banks\nAre inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles—-\nYou know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!\"\n\n\"There ought to be a view around the world\nFrom such a mountain—-if it isn't wooded\nClear to the top.\" I saw through leafy screens\nGreat granite terraces in sun and shadow,\nShelves one could rest a knee on getting up—-\nWith depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;\nOr turn and sit on and look out and down,\nWith little ferns in crevices at his elbow.\n\n\"As to that I can't say. But there's the spring,\nRight on the summit, almost like a fountain.\nThat ought to be worth seeing.\"\n\n\"If it's there.\nYou never saw it?\"\n\nI guess there's no doubt\nAbout its being there. I never saw it.\nIt may not be right on the very top:\nIt wouldn't have to be a long way down\nTo have some head of water from above,\nAnd a _good distance_ down might not be noticed\nBy anyone who'd come a long way up.\nOne time I asked a fellow climbing it\nTo look and tell me later how it was.\"\n\n\"What did he say?\"\n\n\"He said there was a lake\nSomewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.\"\n\n\"But a lake's different. What about the spring?\"\n\n\"He never got up high enough to see.\nThat's why I don't advise your trying this side.\nHe tried this side. I've always meant to go\nAnd look myself, but you know how it is:\nIt doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain\nYou've worked around the foot of all your life.\nWhat would I do? Go in my overalls,\nWith a big stick, the same as when the cows\nHaven't come down to the bars at milking time?\nOr with a shotgun for a stray black bear?\n'Twouldn't seem real to climb for climbing it.\"\n\n\"I shouldn't climb it if I didn't want to—-\nNot for the sake of climbing. What's its name?\"\n\n\"We call it Hor: I don't know if that's right.\"\n\n\"Can one walk round it? Would it be too far?\"\n\n\"You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,\nBut it's as much as ever you can do,\nThe boundary lines keep in so close to it.\nHor is the township, and the township's Hor—-\n_And_ a few houses sprinkled round the foot,\nLike boulders broken off the upper cliff,\nRolled out a little farther than the rest.\"\n\n\"Warm in December, cold in June, you say?\"\n\n\"I don't suppose the waters changed at all.\nYou and I know enough to know it's warm\nCompared with cold, and cold compared with warm.\nBut all the fun's in how you say a thing.\"\n\n\"You've lived here all your life?\"\n\n\"Ever since Hor\n\nWas no bigger than a----\" What, I did not hear.\nHe drew the oxen toward him with light touches\nOf his slim goad on nose and offside flank,\nGave them their marching orders, and was moving.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Tuft Of Flowers",
    "body": "I went to turn the grass once after one\nWho mowed it in the dew before the sun.\n\nThe dew was gone that made his blade so keen\nBefore I came to view the levelled scene.\n\nI looked for him behind an isle of trees;\nI listened for his whetstone on the breeze.\n\nBut he had gone his way, the grass all mown,\nAnd I must be, as he had been—-alone,\n\n\"As all must be,\" I said within my heart,\n\"Whether they work together or apart.\"\n\nBut as I said it, swift there passed me by\nOn noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly,\n\nSeeking with memories grown dim o'er night\nSome resting flower of yesterday's delight.\n\nAnd once I marked his flight go round and round,\nAs where some flower lay withering on the ground.\n\nAnd then he flew as far as eye could see,\nAnd then on tremulous wing came back to me.\n\nI thought of questions that have no reply,\nAnd would have turned to toss the grass to dry;\n\nBut he turned first, and led my eye to look\nAt a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,\n\nA leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared\nBeside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.\n\nI left my place to know them by their name,\nFinding them butterfly weed when I came.\n\nThe mower in the dew had loved them thus,\nBy leaving them to flourish, not for us,\n\nNor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.\nBut from sheer morning gladness at the brim.\n\nThe butterfly and I had lit upon,\nNevertheless, a message from the dawn.\n\nThat made me hear the wakening birds around,\nAnd hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,\n\nAnd feel a spirit kindred to my own;\nSo that henceforth I worked no more alone;\n\nBut glad with him, I worked as with his aid,\nAnd weary, sought at noon with him the shade;\n\nAnd dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech\nWith one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.\n\n\"Men work together,\" I told him from the heart,\n\"Whether they work together or apart.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Mending Wall",
    "body": "Something there is that doesn't love a wall,\nThat sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,\nAnd spills the upper boulders in the sun;\nAnd makes gaps even two can pass abreast.\nThe work of hunters is another thing:\nI have come after them and made repair\nWhere they have left not one stone on a stone,\nBut they would have the rabbit out of hiding,\nTo please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,\nNo one has seen them made or heard them made,\nBut at spring mending-time we find them there.\nI let my neighbour know beyond the hill;\nAnd on a day we meet to walk the line\nAnd set the wall between us once again.\nWe keep the wall between us as we go.\nTo each the boulders that have fallen to each.\nAnd some are loaves and some so nearly balls\nWe have to use a spell to make them balance:\n\"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!\"\nWe wear our fingers rough with handling them.\nOh, just another kind of out-door game,\nOne on a side. It comes to little more:\nThere where it is we do not need the wall:\nHe is all pine and I am apple orchard.\nMy apple trees will never get across\nAnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.\nHe only says, \"Good fences make good neighbours.\"\nSpring is the mischief in me, and I wonder\nIf I could put a notion in his head:\n\"_Why_ do they make good neighbours? Isn't it\nWhere there are cows? But here there are no cows.\nBefore I built a wall I'd ask to know\nWhat I was walling in or walling out,\nAnd to whom I was like to give offence.\nSomething there is that doesn't love a wall,\nThat wants it down.\" I could say \"Elves\" to him,\nBut it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather\nHe said it for himself. I see him there\nBringing a stone grasped firmly by the top\nIn each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.\nHe moves in darkness as it seems to me,\nNot of woods only and the shade of trees.\nHe will not go behind his father's saying,\nAnd he likes having thought of it so well\nHe says again, \"Good fences make good\nneighbours.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "An Encounter",
    "body": "Once on the kind of day called \"weather breeder,\"\nWhen the heat slowly hazes and the sun\nBy its own power seems to be undone,\nI was half boring through, half climbing through,\nA swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar\nAnd scurf of plants, and weary and over-heated,\nAnd sorry I ever left the road I knew,\nI paused and rested on a sort of hook\nThat had me by the coat as good as seated,\nAnd since there was no other way to look,\nLooked up toward heaven, and there against the\nblue\nStood over me a resurrected tree,\nA tree that had been down and raised again—-\nA barkless spectre. He had halted too,\nAs if for fear of treading upon me.\nI saw the strange position of his hands—-\nUp at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands\nOf wire with something in it from men to men.\n\"You here?\" I said. \"Where aren't you nowadays?\nAnd what's the news you carry—-if you know?\nAnd tell me where you're off for-—Montreal?\nMe? I'm not off for anywhere at all.\nSometimes I wander out of beaten ways\nHalf looking for the orchid Calypso.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Wood-Pile",
    "body": "Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day\nI paused and said, \"I will turn back from here.\nNo, I will go on farther—-and we shall see.\"\nThe hard snow held me, save where now and then\nOne foot went through. The view was all in lines\nStraight up and down of tall slim trees\nToo much alike to mark or name a place by\nSo as to say for certain I was here\nOr somewhere else: I was just far from home.\nA small bird flew before me. He was careful\nTo put a tree between us when he lighted,\nAnd say no word to tell me who he was\nWho was so foolish as to think what _he_ thought.\nHe thought that I was after him for a feather—-\nThe white one in his tail; like one who takes\nEverything said as personal to himself.\nOne flight out sideways would have undeceived him.\nAnd then there was a pile of wood for which\nI forgot him and let his little fear\nCarry him off the way I might have gone,\nWithout so much as wishing him good-night.\nHe went behind it to make his last stand.\nIt was a cord of maple, cut and split\nAnd piled—-and measured, four by four by eight.\nAnd not another like it could I see.\nNo runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.\nAnd it was older sure than this year's cutting,\nOr even last year's or the year's before.\nThe wood was gray and the bark warping off it\nAnd the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis\nHad wound strings round and round it like a bundle.\nWhat held it though on one side was a tree\nStill growing, and on one a stake and prop,\nThese latter about to fall. I thought that only\nSomeone who lived in turning to fresh tasks\nCould so forget his handiwork on which\nHe spent himself, the labour of his axe,\nAnd leave it there far from a useful fireplace\nTo warm the frozen swamp as best it could\nWith the slow smokeless burning of decay.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Snow",
    "body": "The three stood listening to a fresh access\nOf wind that caught against the house a moment,\nGulped snow, and then blew free again—-the Coles\nDressed, but dishevelled from some hours of sleep,\nMeserve belittled in the great skin coat he wore.\n\nMeserve was first to speak. He pointed backward\nOver his shoulder with his pipe-stem, saying,\n\"You can just see it glancing off the roof\nMaking a great scroll upward toward the sky,\nLong enough for recording all our names on;\nI think I'll just call up my wife and tell her\nI'm here—-so far—-and starting on again.\nI'll call her softly so that if she's wise\nAnd gone to sleep, she needn't wake to answer.\"\nThree times he barely stirred the bell, then listened.\n\"Why, Lett, still up? Lett, I'm at Cole's. I'm late.\nI called you up to say Good-night from here\nBefore I went to say Good-morning there.—-\nI thought I would.—-I know, but, Lett—-I know—-\nI could, but what's the sense? The rest won't be\nSo bad.—-Give me an hour for it.—-Ho, ho!\nThree hours to here! But that was all up hill;\nThe rest is down.—-Why, no, no, not a wallow:\nThey kept their heads and took their time to it\nLike darlings, both of them. They're in the barn.—-\nMy dear, I'm coming just the same. I didn't\nCall you to ask you to invite me home.—-\"\nHe lingered for some word she wouldn't say,\nSaid it at last himself, \"Good-night,\" and then,\nGetting no answer, closed the telephone.\nThe three stood in the lamplight round the table\nWith lowered eyes a moment till he said,\n\"I'll just see how the horses are.\"\n\n\"Yes, do,\"\nBoth the Coles said together. Mrs. Cole\nAdded: \"You can judge better after seeing.—-\nI want you here with me, Fred. Leave him here,\nBrother Meserve. You know to find your way\nOut through the shed.\"\n\n\"I guess I know my way,\nI guess I know where I can find my name\nCarved in the shed to tell me who I am\nIf it don't tell me where I am. I used\nTo play----\"\n\n\"You tend your horses and come back.\nFred Cole, you're going to let him!\"\n\n\"Well, aren't you?\nHow can you help yourself?\"\n\n\"I called him Brother.\nWhy did I call him that?\"\n\n\"It's right enough.\nThat's all you ever heard him called round here.\nHe seems to have lost off his Christian name.\"\n\n\"Christian enough I should call that myself.\nHe took no notice, did he? Well, at least\nI didn't use it out of love of him,\nThe dear knows. I detest the thought of him\nWith his ten children under ten years old.\nI hate his wretched little Racker Sect,\nAll's ever I heard of it, which isn't much.\nBut that's not saying---- Look, Fred Cole, it's\ntwelve,\nIsn't it, now? He's been here half an hour.\nHe says he left the village store at nine.\nThree hours to do four miles—-a mile an hour\nOr not much better. Why, it doesn't seem\nAs if a man could move that slow and move.\nTry to think what he did with all that time.\nAnd three miles more to go!\"\n\n\"Don't let him go.\nStick to him, Helen. Make him answer you.\nThat sort of man talks straight on all his life\nFrom the last thing he said himself, stone deaf\nTo anything anyone else may say.\nI should have thought, though, you could make him\nhear you.\"\n\n\"What is he doing out a night like this?\nWhy can't he stay at home?\"\n\n\"He had to preach.\"\n\n\"It's no night to be out.\"\n\n\"He may be small,\nHe may be good, but one thing's sure, he's tough.\"\n\n\"And strong of stale tobacco.\"\n\n\"He'll pull through.\"\n\n\"You only say so. Not another house\nOr shelter to put into from this place\nTo theirs. I'm going to call his wife again.\"\n\n\"Wait and he may. Let's see what he will do.\nLet's see if he will think of her again.\nBut then I doubt he's thinking of himself.\nHe doesn't look on it as anything.\"\n\n\"He shan't go--there!\"\n\n\"It is a night, my dear.\"\n\n\"One thing: he dicing drag God into it.\"\n\n\"He don't consider it a case for God.\"\n\n\"You think so, do you? You don't know the kind.\nHe's getting up a miracle this minute.\nPrivately—-to himself, right now, he's thinking\nHe'll make a case of it if he succeeds,\nBut keep still if he fails.\"\n\n\"Keep still all over.\nHe'll be dead--dead and buried.\"\n\n\"Such a trouble!\nNot but I've every reason not to care\nWhat happens to him if it only takes\nSome of the sanctimonious conceit\nOut of one of those pious scalawags.\"\n\n\"Nonsense to that! You want to see him safe.\"\n\n\"You like the runt.\"\n\n\"Don't you a little?\"\n\n\"Well,\nI don't like what he's doing, which is what\nYou like, and like him for.\"\n\n\"Oh, yes, you do\nYou like your fun as well as anyone;\nOnly you women have to put these airs on\nTo impress men. You've got us so ashamed\nOf being men we can't look at a good fight\nBetween two boys and not feel bound to stop it.\nLet the man freeze an ear or two, I say.—-\nHe's here. I leave him all to you. Go in\nAnd save his life.—-All right, come in, Meserve\nSit down, sit down. How did you find the horses?\"\n\n\"Fine, fine.\"\n\n\"And ready for some more? My wife here\nSays it won't do. You've got to give it up.\"\n\n\"Won't you to please me? Please! If I say please?\nMr. Meserve, I'll leave it to _your_ wife.\nWhat _did_ your wife say on the telephone?\"\n\nMeserve seemed to heed nothing but the lamp\nOr something not far from it on the table.\nBy straightening out and lifting a forefinger,\nHe pointed with his hand from where it lay\nLike a white crumpled spider on his knee:\n\"That leaf there in your open book! It moved\nJust then, I thought. It's stood erect like that,\nThere on the table, ever since I came,\nTrying to turn itself backward or forward,\nI've had my eye on it to make out which;\nIf forward, then it's with a friend's impatience—-\nYou see I know—-to get you on to things\nIt wants to see how you will take, if backward\nIt's from regret for something you have passed\nAnd failed to see the good of. Never mind,\nThings must expect to come in front of us\nA many times—-I don't say just how many—-\nThat varies with the things—-before we see them.\nOne of the lies would make it out that nothing\nEver presents itself before us twice.\nWhere would we be at last if that were so?\nOur very life depends on everything's\nRecurring till we answer from within.\nThe thousandth time may prove the charm.—-That\nleaf!\nIt can't turn either way. It needs the wind's help.\nBut the wind didn't move it if it moved.\nIt moved itself. The wind's at naught in here.\nIt couldn't stir so sensitively poised\nA thing as that. It couldn't reach the lamp\nTo get a puff of black smoke from the flame,\nOr blow a rumple in the collie's coat.\nYou make a little foursquare block of air,\nQuiet and light and warm, in spite of all\nThe illimitable dark and cold and storm,\nAnd by so doing give these three, lamp, dog,\nAnd book-leaf, that keep near you, their repose;\nThough for all anyone can tell, repose\nMay be the thing you haven't, yet you give it.\nSo false it is that what we haven't we can't give;\nSo false, that what we always say is true.\nI'll have to turn the leaf if no one else will.\nIt won't lie down. Then let it stand. Who cares?\"\n\n\"I shouldn't want to hurry you, Meserve,\nBut if you're going—- Say you'll stay, you know?\nBut let me raise this curtain on a scene,\nAnd show you how it's piling up against you.\nYou see the snow-white through the white of frost?\nAsk Helen how far up the sash it's climbed\nSince last we read the gage.\"\n\n\"It looks as if\nSome pallid thing had squashed its features flat\nAnd its eyes shut with overeagerness\nTo see what people found so interesting\nIn one another, and had gone to sleep\nOf its own stupid lack of understanding,\nOr broken its white neck of mushroom stuff\nShort off, and died against the window-pane.\"\n\n\"Brother Meserve, take care, you'll scare yourself\nMore than you will us with such nightmare talk.\nIt's you it matters to, because it's you\nWho have to go out into it alone.\"\n\n\"Let him talk, Helen, and perhaps he'll stay.\"\n\n\"Before you drop the curtain—-I'm reminded:\nYou recollect the boy who came out here\nTo breathe the air one winter—-had a room\nDown at the Averys'? Well, one sunny morning\nAfter a downy storm, he passed our place\nAnd found me banking up the house with snow.\nAnd I was burrowing in deep for warmth,\nPiling it well above the window-sills.\nThe snow against the window caught his eye.\n'Hey, that's a pretty thought'—-those were his\nwords.\n'So you can think it's six feet deep outside,\nWhile you sit warm and read up balanced rations.\nYou can't get too much winter in the winter.'\nThose were his words. And he went home and\nall\nBut banked the daylight out of Avery's windows.\nNow you and I would go to no such length.\nAt the same time you can't deny it makes\nIt not a mite worse, sitting here, we three,\nPlaying our fancy, to have the snowline run\nSo high across the pane outside. There where\nThere is a sort of tunnel in the frost\nMore like a tunnel than a hole—-way down\nAt the far end of it you see a stir\nAnd quiver like the frayed edge of the drift\nBlown in the wind. I _like_ that—-I like that.\nWell, now I leave you, people.\"\n\n\"Come, Meserve,\nWe thought you were deciding not to go—-\nThe ways you found to say the praise of comfort\nAnd being where you are. You want to stay.\"\n\n\"I'll own it's cold for such a fall of snow.\nThis house is frozen brittle, all except\nThis room you sit in. If you think the wind\nSounds further off, it's not because it's dying;\nYou're further under in the snow—-that's all—-\nAnd feel it less. Hear the soft bombs of dust\nIt bursts against us at the chimney mouth,\nAnd at the eaves. I like it from inside\nMore than I shall out in it. But the horses\nAre rested and it's time to say good-night,\nAnd let you get to bed again. Good-night,\nSorry I had to break in on your sleep.\"\n\n\"Lucky for you you did. Lucky for you\nYou had us for a half-way station\nTo stop at. If you were the kind of man\nPaid heed to women, you'd take my advice\nAnd for your family's sake stay where you are.\nBut what good is my saying it over and over?\nYou've done more than you had a right to think\nYou could do—-_now._ You know the risk you take\nIn going on.\"\n\n\"Our snow-storms as a rule\nAren't looked on as man-killers, and although\nI'd rather be the beast that sleeps the sleep\nUnder it all, his door sealed up and lost,\nThan the man fighting it to keep above it,\nYet think of the small birds at roost and not\nIn nests. Shall I be counted less than they are?\nTheir bulk in water would be frozen rock\nIn no time out to-night. And yet to-morrow\nThey will come budding boughs from tree to tree\nFlirting their wings and saying Chickadee,\nAs if not knowing what you meant by the word\nstorm.\"\n\n\"But why when no one wants you to go on?\nYour wife—-she doesn't want you to. We don't,\nAnd you yourself don't want to. Who else is there?\"\n\n\"Save us from being cornered by a woman.\nWell, there's\"—-She told Fred afterward that in\nThe pause right there, she thought the dreaded word\nWas coming, \"God.\" But no, he only said\n\"Well, there's—-the storm. That says I must go on.\nThat wants me as a war might if it came.\nAsk any man.\"\n\nHe threw her that as something\nTo last her till he got outside the door.\n\nHe had Cole with him to the barn to see him off.\nWhen Cole returned he found his wife still standing\nBeside the table near the open book,\nNot reading it.\n\n\"Well, what kind of a man\nDo you call that?\" she said.\n\n\"He had the gift\nOf words, or is it tongues, I ought to say?\"\n\n\"Was ever such a man for seeing likeness?\"\n\n\"Or disregarding peopled civil questions—-\nWhat? We've found out in one hour more about\nhim\nThan we had seeing him pass by in the road\nA thousand times. If that's the way he preaches!\nYou didn't think you'd keep him after all.\nOh, I'm not blaming you. He didn't leave you\nMuch say in the matter, and I'm just as glad\nWe're not in for a night of him. No sleep\nIf he had stayed. The least thing set him going.\nIt's quiet as an empty church without him.\"\n\n\"But how much better off are we as it is?\nWe'll have to sit here till we know he's safe.\"\n\n\"Yes, I suppose you'll want to, but I shouldn't.\nHe knows what he can do, or he wouldn't try.\nGet into bed I say, and get some rest.\nHe won't come back, and if he telephones,\nIt won't be for an hour or two.\"\n\n\"Well then\nWe can't be any help by sitting here\nAnd living his fight through with him, I suppose.\n\n-----\n\nCole had been telephoning in the dark.\nMrs. Cole's voice came from an inner room:\n\"Did she call you or you call her?\"\n\n\"She me.\nYou'd better dress: you won't go back to bed.\nWe must have been asleep: it's three and after.\"\n\n\"Had she been ringing long? I'll get my wrapper.\nI want to speak to her.\"\n\n\"All she said was,\nHe hadn't come and had he really started.\"\n\n\"She knew he had, poor thing, two hours ago.\n\n\"He had the shovel. Hell have made a fight.\"\n\n\"Why did I ever let him leave this house!\"\n\n\"Don't begin that. You did the best you could\nTo keep him—-though perhaps you didn't quite\nConceal a wish to see him show the spunk\nTo disobey you. Much his wife'll thank you.\"\n\n\"Fred, after all I said! You shan't make out\nThat it was any way but what it was.\nDid she let on by any word she said\nShe didn't thank me?\"\n\n\"When I told her 'Gone,'\n'Well then,' she said, and 'Well then'—-like a\nthreat.\nAnd then her voice came scraping slow: 'Oh, you,\nWhy did you let him go'?\"\n\n\"Asked why we let him?\nYou let me there. I'll ask her why she let him.\nShe didn't dare to speak when he was here.\nTheir number's—-twenty-one? The thing won't\nwork.\nSomeone's receiver's down. The handle stumbles.\nThe stubborn thing, the way it jars your arm!\nIt's theirs. She's dropped it from her hand and\ngone.\"\n\n\"Try speaking. Say 'Hello'!\"\n\n\"Hello, Hello.\"\n\n\"What do you hear?\"\n\n\"I hear an empty room—-\nYou know—-it sounds that way. And yes, I hear—-\nI think I hear a clock—-and windows rattling.\nNo step though. If she's there she's sitting down.\"\n\n\"Shout, she may hear you.\"\n\n\"Shouting is no good.\"\n\n\"Keep speaking then.\"\n\n\"Hello. Hello. Hello.\nYou don't suppose—-? She wouldn't go out doors?\"\n\n\"I'm half afraid that's just what she might do.\"\n\n\"And leave the children?\"\n\n\"Wait and call again.\nYou can't hear whether she has left the door\nWide open and the wind's blown out the lamp\nAnd the fire's died and the room's dark and cold?\"\n\n\"One of two things, either she's gone to bed\nOr gone out doors.\"\n\n\"In which case both are lost.\nDo you know what she's like? Have you ever met\nher?\nIt's strange she doesn't want to speak to us.\"\n\n\"Fred, see if you can hear what I hear. Come.\"\n\n\"A clock maybe.\"\n\n\"Don't you hear something else?\"\n\n\"Not talking.\"\n\n\"No.\"\n\n\"Why, yes, I hear—-what is it?\"\n\n\"What do you say it is?\"\n\n\"A baby's crying!\nFrantic it sounds, though muffled and far off.\"\n\n\"Its mother wouldn't let it cry like that,\nNot if she's there.\"\n\n\"What do you make of it?\"\n\n\"There's only one thing possible to make,\nThat is, assuming—-that she has gone out.\nOf course she hasn't though.\" They both sat down\nHelpless. \"There's nothing we can do till\nmorning.\"\n\n\"Fred, I shan't let you think of going out.\"\n\n\"Hold on.\" The double bell began to chirp.\nThey started up. Fred took the telephone.\n\"Hello, Meserve. You're there, then!—-And your\nwife?\n\nGood! Why I asked—-she didn't seem to answer.\nHe says she went to let him in the barn.—-\nWe're glad. Oh, say no more about it, man.\nDrop in and see us when you're passing.\"\n\n\"Well.\nShe has him then, though what she wants him for\nI _don't_ see.\"\n\n\"Possibly not for herself.\nMaybe she only wants him for the children.\"\n\n\"The whole to-do seems to have been for nothing.\nWhat spoiled our night was to him just his fun.\nWhat did he come in for?—-To talk and visit?\nThought he'd just call to tell us it was snowing.\nIf he thinks he is going to make our house\nA halfway coffee house 'twixt town and\nnowhere----\"\n\n\"I thought you'd feel you'd been too much\nconcerned.\"\n\n\"You think you haven't been concerned yourself.\"\n\n\"If you mean he was inconsiderate\nTo rout us out to think for him at midnight\nAnd then take our advice no more than nothing,\nWhy, I agree with you. But let's forgive him.\nWe've had a share in one night of his life.\nWhat'll you bet he ever calls again?\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "In The Home Stretch",
    "body": "She stood against the kitchen sink, and looked\nOver the sink out through a dusty window\nAt weeds the water from the sink made tall.\nShe wore her cape; her hat was in her hand.\nBehind her was confusion in the room,\nOf chairs turned upside down to sit like people\nIn other chairs, and something, come to look,\nFor every room a house has—-parlor, bed-room,\nAnd dining-room—-thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.\nAnd now and then a smudged, infernal face\nLooked in a door behind her and addressed\nHer back. She always answered without turning.\n\n\"Where will I put this walnut bureau, lady?\"\n\n\"Put it on top of something that's on top\nOf something else,\" she laughed. \"Oh, put it where\nYou can to-night, and go. It's almost dark;\nYou must be getting started back to town.\"\nAnother blackened face thrust in and looked\nAnd smiled, and when she did not turn, spoke\ngently,\n\"What are you seeing out the window, _lady?_\"\n\n\"Never was I beladied so before.\nWould evidence of having been called lady\nMore than so many times make me a lady\nIn common law, I wonder.\"\n\n\"But I ask,\nWhat are you seeing out the window, lady?\"\n\n\"What I'll be seeing more of in the years\nTo come as here I stand and go the round\nOf many plates with towels many times.\"\n\n\"And what is that? You only put me off.\"\n\n\"Rank weeds that love the water from the dish-pan\nMore than some women like the dish-pan, Joe;\nA little stretch of mowing-field for you;\nNot much of that until I come to woods\nThat end all. And it's scarce enough to call\nA view.\"\n\n\"And yet you think you like it, dear?\"\n\n\"That's what you're so concerned to know! You\nhope\nI like it. Bang goes something big away\nOff there upstairs. The very tread of men\nAs great as those is shattering to the frame\nOf such a little house. Once left alone,\nYou and I, dear, will go with softer steps\nUp and down stairs and through the rooms, and\nnone\nBut sudden winds that snatch them from our hands\nWill ever slam the doors.\"\n\n\"I think you see\nMore than you like to own to out that window.\"\n\n\"No; for besides the things I tell you of,\nI only see the years. They come and go\nIn alternation with the weeds, the field,\nThe wood.\"\n\n\"What kind of years?\"\n\n\"Why, latter years—-\n\nDifferent from early years.\"\n\n\"I see them, too.\n\nYou didn't count them?\"\n\n\"No, the further off\nSo ran together that I didn't try to.\nIt can scarce be that they would be in number\nWe'd care to know, for we are not young now.\nAnd bang goes something else away off there.\nIt sounds as if it were the men went down,\nAnd every crash meant one less to return\nTo lighted city streets we, too, have known,\nBut now are giving up for country darkness.\"\n\n\"Come from that window where you see too much\nfor me,\nAnd take a livelier view of things from here.\nThey're going. Watch this husky swarming up\nOver the wheel into the sky-high seat,\nLighting his pipe now, squinting down his nose\nAt the flame burning downward as he sucks it.\"\n\n\"See how it makes his nose-side bright, a proof\nHow dark it's getting. Can you tell what time\nIt is by that? Or by the moon? The new moon!\nWhat shoulder did I see her over? Neither.\nA wire she is of silver, as new as we\nTo everything. Her light won't last us long.\nIt's something, though, to know we're going to\nhave her\nNight after night and stronger every night\nTo see us through our first two weeks. But, Joe,\nThe stove! Before they go! Knock on the window;\nAsk them to help you get it on its feet.\nWe stand here dreaming. Hurry! Call them back!\"\n\n\"They're not gone yet.\"\n\n\"We've got to have the stove,\nWhatever else we want for. And a light.\nHave we a piece of candle if the lamp\nAnd oil are buried out of reach?\"\n\nAgain\nThe house was full of tramping, and the dark,\nDoor-filling men burst in and seized the stove.\nA cannon-mouth-like hole was in the wall,\nTo which they set it true by eye; and then\nCame up the jointed stovepipe in their hands,\nSo much too light and airy for their strength\nIt almost seemed to come ballooning up,\nSlipping from clumsy clutches toward the ceiling.\n\"A fit!\" said one, and banged a stovepipe shoulder.\n\"It's good luck when you move in to begin\nWith good luck with your stovepipe. Never mind,\nIt's not so bad in the country, settled down,\nWhen people 're getting on in life. You'll like it.\"\nJoe said: \"You big boys ought to find a farm,\nAnd make good farmers, and leave other fellows\nThe city work to do. There's not enough\nFor everybody as it is in there.\"\n\"God!\" one said wildly, and, when no one spoke:\n\"Say that to Jimmy here. He needs a farm.\"\nBut Jimmy only made his jaw recede\nFool-like, and rolled his eyes as if to say\nHe saw himself a farmer. Then there was a French\nboy\nWho said with seriousness that made them laugh,\n\"Ma friend, you ain't know what it is you're ask.\"\nHe doffed his cap and held it with both hands\nAcross his chest to make as 'twere a bow:\n\"We're giving you our chances on de farm.\"\nAnd then they all turned to with deafening boots\nAnd put each other bodily out of the house.\n\"Goodby to them! We puzzle them. They think—-\nI don't know what they think we see in what\nThey leave us to: that pasture slope that seems\nThe back some farm presents us; and your woods\nTo northward from your window at the sink,\nWaiting to steal a step on us whenever\nWe drop our eyes or turn to other things,\nAs in the game 'Ten-step' the children play.\"\n\n\"Good boys they seemed, and let them love the city.\nAll they could say was 'God!' when you proposed\nTheir coming out and making useful farmers.\"\n\n\"Did they make something lonesome go through\nyou?\nIt would take more than them to sicken you—-\nUs of our bargain. But they left us so\nAs to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.\nThey almost shook _me._\"\n\n\"It's all so much\nWhat we have always wanted, I confess\nIt's seeming bad for a moment makes it seem\nEven worse still, and so on down, down, down.\nIt's nothing; it's their leaving us at dusk.\nI never bore it well when people went.\nThe first night after guests have gone, the house\nSeems haunted or exposed. I always take\nA personal interest in the locking up\nAt bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off.\"\nHe fetched a dingy lantern from behind\nA door. \"There's that we didn't lose! And these!\"\nSome matches he unpocketed. \"For food—-\nThe meals we've had no one can take from us.\nI wish that everything on earth were just\nAs certain as the meals we've had. I wish\nThe meals we haven't had were, anyway.\nWhat have you you know where to lay your hands\non?\"\n\n\"The bread we bought in passing at the store.\nThere's butter somewhere, too.\"\n\n\"Let's rend the bread.\nI'll light the fire for company for you;\nYou'll not have any other company\nTill Ed begins to get out on a Sunday\nTo look us over and give us his idea\nOf what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up.\nHe'll know what he would do if he were we,\nAnd all at once. He'll plan for us and plan\nTo help us, but he'll take it out in planning.\nWell, you can set the table with the loaf.\nLet's see you find your loaf. I'll light the fire.\nI like chairs occupying other chairs\nNot offering a lady—-\"\n\n\"There again, Joe!\n_You're tired._\"\n\n\"I'm drunk-nonsensical tired out;\nDon't mind a word I say. It's a day's work\nTo empty one house of all household goods\nAnd fill another with 'em fifteen miles away,\nAlthough you do no more than dump them down.\"\n\n\"Dumped down in paradise we are and happy.\"\n\n\"It's all so much what I have always wanted,\nI can't believe it's what you wanted, too.\"\n\n\"Shouldn't you like to know?\"\n\n\"I'd like to know\nIf it is what you wanted, then how much\nYou wanted it for me.\"\n\n\"A troubled conscience!\nYou don't want me to tell if _I_ don't know.\"\n\n\"I don't want to find out what can't be known.\nBut who first said the word to come?\"\n\nMy dear,\nIt's who first thought the thought. You're\nsearching, Joe,\nFor things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.\nEnds and beginnings—-there are no such things.\nThere are only middles.\"\n\n\"What is this?\"\n\n\"This life?\nOur sitting here by lantern-light together\nAmid the wreckage of a former home?\nYou won't deny the lantern isn't new.\nThe stove is not, and you are not to me,\nNor I to you.\"\n\n\"Perhaps you never were?\"\n\n\"It would take me forever to recite\nAll that's not new in where we find ourselves.\nNew is a word for fools in towns who think\nStyle upon style in dress and thought at last\nMust get somewhere. I've heard you say as much.\nNo, this is no beginning.\"\n\n\"Then an end?\"\n\n\"End is a gloomy word.\"\n\n\"Is it too late\nTo drag you out for just a good-night call\nOn the old peach trees on the knoll to grope\nBy starlight in the grass for a last peach\nThe neighbors may not have taken as their right\nWhen the house wasn't lived in? I've been looking:\nI doubt if they have left us many grapes.\nBefore we set ourselves to right the house,\nThe first thing in the morning, out we go\nTo go the round of apple, cherry, peach,\nPine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.\nAll of a farm it is.\"\n\n\"I know this much:\nI'm going to put you in your bed, if first\nI have to make you build it. Come, the light.\"\n\nWhen there was no more lantern in the kitchen,\nThe fire got out through crannies in the stove\nAnd danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,\nAs much at home as if they'd always danced there.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Road Not Taken",
    "body": "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,\nAnd sorry I could not travel both\nAnd be one traveller, long I stood\nAnd looked down one as far as I could\nTo where it bent in the undergrowth;\n\nThen took the other, as just as fair,\nAnd having perhaps the better claim,\nBecause it was grassy and wanted wear;\nThough as for that the passing there\nHad worn them really about the same,\n\nAnd both that morning equally lay\nIn leaves no step had trodden black.\nOh, I kept the first for another day!\nYet knowing how way leads on to way,\nI doubted if I should ever come back.\n\nI shall be telling this with a sigh\nSomewhere ages and ages hence:\nTwo roads diverged in a wood, and I—-\nI took the one less travelled by,\nAnd that has made all the difference.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Oven Bird",
    "body": "There is a singer everyone has heard,\nLoud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,\nWho makes the solid tree trunks sound again.\nHe says that leaves are old and that for flowers\nMid-summer is to spring as one to ten.\nHe says the early petal-fall is past\nWhen pear and cherry bloom went down in showers\nOn sunny days a moment overcast;\nAnd comes that other fall we name the fall.\nHe says the highway dust is over all.\nThe bird would cease and be as other birds\nBut that he knows in singing not to sing.\nThe question that he frames in all but words\nIs what to make of a diminished thing.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Vantage Point",
    "body": "If tired of trees I seek again mankind,\nWell I know where to hie me—-in the dawn,\nTo a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.\nThere amid lolling juniper reclined,\nMyself unseen, I see in white defined\nFar off the homes of men, and farther still,\nThe graves of men on an opposing hill,\nLiving or dead, whichever are most to mind.\n\nAnd if by noon I have too much of these,\nI have but to turn on my arm, and lo,\nThe sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow\nMy breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,\nI smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant,\nI look into the crater of the ant.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Sound Of Trees",
    "body": "I wonder about the trees.\nWhy do we wish to bear\nForever the noise of these\nMore than another noise\nSo close to our dwelling place?\nWe suffer them by the day\nTill we lose all measure of pace,\nAnd fixity in our joys,\nAnd acquire a listening air.\nThey are that that talks of going\nBut never gets away;\nAnd that talks no less for knowing,\nAs it grows wiser and older,\nThat now it means to stay.\nMy feet tug at the floor\nAnd my head sways to my shoulder\nSometimes when I watch trees sway,\nFrom the window or the door.\nI shall set forth for somewhere,\nI shall make the reckless choice\nSome day when they are in voice\nAnd tossing so as to scare\nThe white clouds over them on.\nI shall have less to say,\nBut I shall be gone.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Hyla Brook",
    "body": "By June our brook's run out of song and speed.\nSought for much after that, it will be found\nEither to have gone groping underground\n(And taken with it all the Hyla breed\nThat shouted in the mist a month ago,\nLike ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—-\nOr flourished and come up in jewel-weed,\nWeak foliage that is blown upon and bent\nEven against the way its waters went.\nIts bed is left a faded paper sheet\nOf dead leaves stuck together by the heat—-\nA brook to none but who remember long.\nThis as it will be seen is other far\nThan with brooks taken otherwhere in song.\nWe love the things we love for what they are.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "My November Guest",
    "body": "My Sorrow, when she's here with me,\nThinks these dark days of autumn rain\nAre beautiful as days can be;\nShe loves the bare, the withered tree;\nShe walks the sodden pasture lane.\n\nHer pleasure will not let me stay.\nShe talks and I am fain to list:\nShe's glad the birds are gone away,\nShe's glad her simple worsted grey\nIs silver now with clinging mist.\n\nThe desolate, deserted trees,\nThe faded earth, the heavy sky,\nThe beauties she so truly sees,\nShe thinks I have no eye for these,\nAnd vexes me for reason why.\n\nNot yesterday I learned to know\nThe love of bare November days\nBefore the coming of the snow,\nBut it were vain to tell her so,\nAnd they are better for her praise.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Range-Finding",
    "body": "The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung\nAnd cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest\nBefore it stained a single human breast.\nThe stricken flower bent double and so hung.\nAnd still the bird revisited her young.\nA butterfly its fall had dispossessed\nA moment sought in air his flower of rest,\nThen lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.\n\nOn the bare upland pasture there had spread\nO'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread\nAnd straining cables wet with silver dew.\nA sudden passing bullet shook it dry.\nThe indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,\nBut finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "October",
    "body": "O hushed October morning mild,\nThy leaves have ripened to the fall;\nTo-morrow's wind, if it be wild,\nShould waste them all.\nThe crows above the forest call;\nTo-morrow they may form and go.\nO hushed October morning mild,\nBegin the hours of this day slow,\nMake the day seem to us less brief.\nHearts not averse to being beguiled,\nBeguile us in the way you know;\nRelease one leaf at break of day;\nAt noon release another leaf;\nOne from our trees, one far away;\nRetard the sun with gentle mist;\nEnchant the land with amethyst.\nSlow, slow!\nFor the grapes' sake, if they were all,\nWhose leaves already are burnt with frost,\nWhose clustered fruit must else be lost—-\nFor the grapes' sake along the wall.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "To The Thawing Wind",
    "body": "Come with rain, O loud Southwester!\nBring the singer, bring the nester;\nGive the buried flower a dream;\nMake the settled snow-bank steam;\nFind the brown beneath the white;\nBut whate'er you do to-night,\nBathe my window, make it flow,\nMelt it as the ice will go;\nMelt the glass and leave the sticks\nLike a hermit's crucifix;\nBurst into my narrow stall;\nSwing the picture on the wall;\nRun the rattling pages o'er;\nScatter poems on the floor;\nTurn the poet out of door.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Time To Talk",
    "body": "When a friend calls to me from the road\nAnd slows his horse to a meaning walk\nI don't stand still and look around\nOn all the hills I haven't hoed,\nAnd shout from where I am, What is it?\nNo, not as there is a time to talk.\nI thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,\nBlade-end up and five feet tall,\nAnd plod: I go up to the stone wall\nFor a friendly visit.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "The Code",
    "body": "There were three in the meadow by the brook\nGathering up windrows, piling cocks of hay,\nWith an eye always lifted toward the west\nWhere an irregular sun-bordered cloud\nDarkly advanced with a perpetual dagger\nFlickering across its bosom. Suddenly\nOne helper, thrusting pitchfork in the ground,\nMarched himself off the field and home. One stayed.\nThe town-bred farmer failed to understand.\n\n\"What was there wrong?\"\n\n\"Something you just now said.\"\n\n\"What did I say?\"\n\n\"About our taking pains.\n\n\"To cock the hay?—-because it's going to shower?\nI said that more than half an hour ago.\nI said it to myself as much as you.\"\n\n\"You didn't know. But James is one big fool.\nHe thought you meant to find fault with his work.\nThat's what the average farmer would have meant.\nJames would take time, of course, to chew it over\nBefore he acted: he's just got round to act.\"\n\n\"He is a fool if that's the way he takes me.\"\n\n\"Don't let it bother you. You've found out\nsomething.\nThe hand that knows his business won't be told\nTo do work better or faster—-those two things.\nI'm as particular as anyone:\nMost likely I'd have served you just the same.\nBut I know you don't understand our ways.\nYou were just talking what was in your mind,\nWhat was in all our minds, and you weren't hinting.\n\nTell you a story of what happened once:\nI was up here in Salem at a man's\nNamed Sanders with a gang of four or five\nDoing the haying. No one liked the boss.\nHe was one of the kind sports call a spider,\nAll wiry arms and legs that spread out wavy\nFrom a humped body nigh as big's a biscuit.\nBut work! that man could work, especially\nIf by so doing he could get more work,\nOut of his hired help. I'm not denying\nHe was hard on himself. I couldn't find\nThat he kept any hours—-not for himself.\nDaylight and lantern-light were one to him:\nI've heard him pounding in the barn all night.\nBut what he liked was someone to encourage.\nThem that he couldn't lead he'd get behind\nAnd drive, the way you can, you know, in mowing—-\nKeep at their heels and threaten to mow their legs\noff.\nI'd seen about enough of his bulling tricks\n(We call that bulling). I'd been watching him.\nSo when he paired off with me in the hayfield\nTo load the load, thinks I, Look out for trouble.\nI built the load and topped it off; old Sanders\nCombed it down with a rake and says, 'O. K.'\nEverything went well till we reached the barn\nWith a big jag to empty in a bay.\nYou understand that meant the easy job\nFor the man up on top of throwing _down_\nThe hay and rolling it off wholesale,\nWhere on a mow it would have been slow lifting.\nYou wouldn't think a fellow'd need much urging\nUnder those circumstances, would you now?\nBut the old fool seizes his fork in both hands,\nAnd looking up bewhiskered out of the pit,\nShouts like an army captain, 'Let her come!\nThinks I, D'ye mean it? 'What was that you\nsaid?'\nI asked out loud, so's there'd be no mistake,\n'Did you say, Let her come?' 'Yes, let her come.'\nHe said it over, but he said it softer.\nNever you say a thing like that to a man,\nNot if he values what he is. God, I'd as soon\nMurdered him as left out his middle name.\nI'd built the load and knew right where to find it.\nTwo or three forkfuls I picked lightly round for\nLike meditating, and then I just dug in\nAnd dumped the rackful on him in ten lots,\nI looked over the side once in the dust\nAnd caught sight of him treading-water-like,\nKeeping his head above. 'Damn ye,' I says,\n'That gets ye!' He squeaked like a squeezed rat.\nThat was the last I saw or heard of him.\nI cleaned the rack and drove out to cool off.\nAs I sat mopping hayseed from my neck,\nAnd sort of waiting to be asked about it,\nOne of the boys sings out, 'Where's the old man?'\n'I left him in the barn under the hay.\nIf ye want him, ye can go and dig him out.'\nThey realised from the way I swobbed my neck\nMore than was needed something must be up.\nThey headed for the barn; I stayed where I was.\nThey told me afterward. First they forked hay,\nA lot of it, out into the barn floor.\nNothing! They listened for him. Not a rustle.\nI guess they thought I'd spiked him in the temple\nBefore I buried him, or I couldn't have managed.\nThey excavated more. 'Go keep his wife\nOut of the barn.' Someone looked in a window,\nAnd curse me if he wasn't in the kitchen\nSlumped way down in a chair, with both his feet\nStuck in the oven, the hottest day that summer.\nHe looked so clean disgusted from behind\nThere was no one that dared to stir him up,\nOr let him know that he was being looked at.\nApparently I hadn't buried him\n(I may have knocked him down); but my just\ntrying\nTo bury him had hurt his dignity.\nHe had gone to the house so's not to meet me.\nHe kept away from us all afternoon.\nWe tended to his hay. We saw him out\nAfter a while picking peas in his garden:\nHe couldn't keep away from doing something.\"\n\n\"Weren't you relieved to find he wasn't dead?\"\n\n\"No! and yet I don't know—-it's hard to say.\nI went about to kill him fair enough.\"\n\n\"You took an awkward way. Did he discharge\nyou?\"\n\"Discharge me? No! He knew I did just right.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "A Hundred Collars",
    "body": "Lancaster bore him—-such a little town,\nSuch a great man. It doesn't see him often\nOf late years, though he keeps the old homestead\nAnd sends the children down there with their mother\nTo run wild in the summer—-a little wild.\nSometimes he joins them for a day or two\nAnd sees old friends he somehow can't get near.\nThey meet him in the general store at night,\nPreoccupied with formidable mail,\nRifling a printed letter as he talks.\nThey seem afraid. He wouldn't have it so:\nThough a great scholar, he's a democrat,\nIf not at heart, at least on principle.\nLately when coming up to Lancaster\nHis train being late he missed another train\nAnd had four hours to wait at Woodsville Junction\nAfter eleven o'clock at night. Too tired\nTo think of sitting such an ordeal out,\nHe turned to the hotel to find a bed.\n\n\"No room,\" the night clerk said. \"Unless----\"\nWoodsville's a place of shrieks and wandering lamps\nAnd cars that shock and rattle—-and _one_ hotel.\n\n\"You say 'unless.'\"\n\n\"Unless you wouldn't mind\nSharing a room with someone else.\"\n\n\"Who is it?\"\n\n\"A man.\n\n\"So I should hope. What kind of man?\"\n\n\"I know him: he's all right. A man's a man.\nSeparate beds of course you understand.\"\n\nThe night clerk blinked his eyes and dared him on.\n\"Who's that man sleeping in the office chair?\nHas he had the refusal of my chance?\"\n\n\"He was afraid of being robbed or murdered.\nWhat do you say?\"\n\n\"I'll have to have a bed.\"\n\nThe night clerk led him up three flights of stairs\nAnd down a narrow passage full of doors,\nAt the last one of which he knocked and entered,\n\"Lafe, here's a fellow wants to share your\nroom.\"\n\n\"Show him this way. I'm not afraid of him,\nI'm not so drunk I can't take care of myself.\"\nThe night clerk clapped a bedstead on the foot.\n\"This will be yours. Good-night,\" he said, and\nwent.\n\n\"Lafe was the name, I think?\"\n\n\"Yes, _Lay_fayette.\nYou got it the first time. And yours?\"\n\n\"Magoon.\n\nDoctor Magoon.\"\n\n\"A Doctor?\"\n\n\"Well, a teacher.\"\n\n\"Professor Square-the-circle-till-you're-tired?\nHold on, there's something I don't think of now\nThat I had on my mind to ask the first\nMan that knew anything I happened in with.\nI'll ask you later—-don't let me forget it.\"\nThe Doctor looked at Lafe and looked away.\nA man? A brute. Naked above the waist,\nHe sat there creased and shining in the light,\nFumbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt.\n\"I'm moving into a size-larger shirt.\nI've felt mean lately; mean's no name for it.\nI just found what the matter was to-night:\nI've been a-choking like a nursery tree\nWhen it outgrows the wide band of its name tag.\nI blamed it on the hot spell we've been having.\n'Twas nothing but my foolish hanging back,\nNot liking to own up I'd grown a size.\nNumber eighteen this is. What size do you wear?\"\n\nThe Doctor caught his throat convulsively.\n\"Oh—-ah—-fourteen—-fourteen.\"\n\n\"Fourteen! You say so!\nI can remember when I wore fourteen.\nAnd come to think I must have back at home\nMore than a hundred collars, size fourteen.\nToo bad to waste them all. You ought to have them.\nThey're yours and welcome; let me send them to\nyou.\nWhat makes you stand there on one leg like that?\nYou're not much furtherer than where Kike left you,\nYou act as if you wished you hadn't come.\nSit down or lie down friend; you make me nervous.\"\n\nThe Doctor made a subdued dash for it,\nAnd propped himself at bay against a pillow.\n\n\"Not that way, with your shoes on Kike's white\nbed.\nYou can't rest that way. Let me pull your shoes\noff.\"\n\n\"Don't touch me, please—-I say, don't touch me,\nplease.\nI'll not be put to bed by you, my man.\"\n\n\"Just as you say. Have it your own way then.\n'My man' is it? You talk like a professor.\nSpeaking of who's afraid of who, however,\nI'm thinking I have more to lose than you\nIf anything should happen to be wrong.\nWho wants to cut your number fourteen throat!\nLet's have a show down as an evidence\nOf good faith. There is ninety dollars.\nCome, if you're not afraid.\"\n\n\"_I_'m not afraid.\nThere's five: that's all I carry.\"\n\n\"I can search you?\nWhere are you moving over to? Stay still.\n\nYou'd better tuck your money under you\nAnd sleep on it the way I always do\nWhen I'm with people I don't trust at night.\"\n\n\"Will you believe me if I put it there\nRight on the counterpane—-that I do trust you?\"\n\n\"You'd say so, Mister Man.—-I'm a collector.\nMy ninety isn't mine—-you won't think that.\nI pick it up a dollar at a time\nAll round the country for the _Weekly News_,\nPublished in Bow. You know the _Weekly News?_\"\n\n\"Known it since I was young.\"\n\n\"Then you know me.\nNow we are getting on together—-talking.\nI'm sort of Something for it at the front.\nMy business is to find what people want:\nThey pay for it, and so they ought to have it.\nFairbanks, he says to me—-he's editor—-\nFeel out the public sentiment—-he says.\nA good deal comes on me when all is said.\nThe only trouble is we disagree\nIn politics: I'm Vermont Democrat—-\nYou know what that is, sort of double-dyed;\nThe _News_ has always been Republican.\nFairbanks, he says to me, 'Help us this year,'\nMeaning by us their ticket. 'No,' I says,\n'I can't and won't. You've been in long enough:\nIt's time you turned around and boosted us.\nYou'll have to pay me more than ten a week\nIf I'm expected to elect Bill Taft.\nI doubt if I could do it anyway.'\"\n\n\"You seem to shape the paper's policy.\"\n\n\"You see I'm in with everybody, know 'em all.\nI almost know their farms as well as they do.\"\n\n\"You drive around? It must be pleasant work.\"\n\n\"It's business, but I can't say it's not fun.\nWhat I like best's the lay of different farms,\nComing out on them from a stretch of woods,\nOr over a hill or round a sudden corner.\nI like to find folks getting out in spring,\nRaking the dooryard, working near the house.\nLater they get out further in the fields.\nEverything's shut sometimes except the barn;\nThe family's all away in some back meadow.\nThere's a hay load a-coming—-when it comes.\nAnd later still they all get driven in:\nThe fields are stripped to lawn, the garden patches\nStripped to bare ground, the apple trees\nTo whips and poles. There's nobody about.\nThe chimney, though, keeps up a good brisk\nsmoking.\nAnd I lie back and ride. I take the reins\nOnly when someone's coming, and the mare\nStops when she likes: I tell her when to go.\nI've spoiled Jemima in more ways than one.\nShe's got so she turns in at every house\nAs if she had some sort of curvature,\nNo matter if I have no errand there.\nShe thinks I'm sociable. I maybe am.\nIt's seldom I get down except for meals, though.\nFolks entertain me from the kitchen doorstep,\nAll in a family row down to the youngest.\"\n\n\"One would suppose they might not be as glad\nTo see you as you are to see them.\"\n\n\"Oh,\nBecause I want their dollar. I don't want\nAnything they've not got. I never dun.\nI'm there, and they can pay me if they like.\nI go nowhere on purpose: I happen by.\nSorry there is no cup to give you a drink.\nI drink out of the bottle—-not your style.\nMayn't I offer you----?\"\n\n\"No, no, no, thank you.\n\n\"Just as you say. Here's looking at you then.—-\nAnd now I'm leaving you a little while.\n\nYou'll rest easier when I'm gone, perhaps—-\nLie down—-let yourself go and get some sleep.\nBut first—-let's see—-what was I going to ask you?\nThose collars—-who shall I address them to,\nSuppose you aren't awake when I come back?\"\n\n\"Really, friend, I can't let you. You—-may need\nthem.\"\n\n\"Not till I shrink, when they'll be out of style.\"\n\n\"But really—-I have so many collars.\"\n\n\"I don't know who I rather would have have them.\nThey're only turning yellow where they are.\nBut you're the doctor as the saying is.\nI'll put the light out. Don't you wait for me:\nI've just begun the night. You get some sleep.\nI'll knock so-fashion and peep round the door\nWhen I come back so you'll know who it is.\nThere's nothing I'm afraid of like scared people.\nI don't want you should shoot me in the head.\nWhat am I doing carrying off this bottle?\nThere now, you get some sleep.\"\n\nHe shut the door\nThe Doctor slid a little down the pillow.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Blueberries",
    "body": "\"You ought to have seen what I saw on my way\nTo the village, through Mortenson's pasture to-day:\nBlueberries as big as the end of your thumb,\nReal sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum\nIn the cavernous pail of the first one to come!\nAnd all ripe together, not some of them green\nAnd some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!\"\n\n\"I don't know what part of the pasture you mean.\"\n\n\"You know where they cut off the woods—-let me\nsee—-\nIt was two years ago—-or no!—-can it be\nNo longer than that?—-and the following fall\nThe fire ran and burned it all up but the wall.\"\n\n\"Why, there hasn't been time for the bushes to\ngrow.\nThat's always the way with the blueberries, though:\nThere may not have been the ghost of a sign\nOf them anywhere under the shade of the pine,\nBut get the pine out of the way, you may burn\nThe pasture all over until not a fern\nOr grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick,\nAnd presto, they're up all around you as thick\nAnd hard to explain as a conjurer's trick.\"\n\n\"It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit.\nI taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot.\n\nAnd after all really they're ebony skinned:\nThe blue's but a mist from the breath of the wind,\nA tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand,\nAnd less than the tan with which pickers are\ntanned.\"\n\n\"Does Mortenson know what he has, do you\nthink?\"\n\n\"He may and not care and so leave the chewink\nTo gather them for him—-you know what he is.\nHe won't make the fact that they're rightfully his\nAn excuse for keeping us other folk out.\"\n\n\"I wonder you didn't see Loren about.\"\n\n\"The best of it was that I did. Do you know,\nI was just getting through what the field had to show\nAnd over the wall and into the road,\nWhen who should come by, with a democrat-load\nOf all the young chattering Lorens alive,\nBut Loren, the fatherly, out for a drive.\"\n\n\"He saw you, then? What did he do? Did he\nfrown?\"\n\n\"He just kept nodding his head up and down.\nYou know how politely he always goes by.\nBut he thought a big thought—-I could tell by his\neye—-\nWhich being expressed, might be this in effect:\n'I have left those there berries, I shrewdly suspect,\nTo ripen too long. I am greatly to blame.'\"\n\n\"He's a thriftier person than some I could name.\"\n\n\"He seems to be thrifty; and hasn't he need,\nWith the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed?\nHe has brought them all up on wild berries, they\nsay,\nLike birds. They store a great many away.\nThey eat them the year round, and those they\ndon't eat\nThey sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet.\"\n\n\"Who cares what they say? It's a nice way to live,\nJust taking what Nature is willing to give,\nNot forcing her hand with harrow and plow.\"\n\n\"I wish you had seen his perpetual bow—-\nAnd the air of the youngsters! Not one of them\nturned,\nAnd they looked so solemn-absurdly concerned.\"\n\n\"I wish I knew half what the flock of them know\nOf where all the berries and other things grow,\nCranberries in bogs and raspberries on top\nOf the boulder-strewn mountain, and when they\nwill crop.\nI met them one day and each had a flower\nStuck into his berries as fresh as a shower;\nSome strange kind—-they told me it hadn't a name.\"\n\n\"I've told you how once, not long after we came,\nI almost provoked poor Loren to mirth\nBy going to him of all people on earth\nTo ask if he knew any fruit to be had\nFor the picking. The rascal, he said he'd be glad\nTo tell if he knew. But the year had been bad.\nThere _had_ been some berries—-but those were all\ngone.\nHe didn't say where they had been. He went on:\n'I'm sure—-I'm sure'-—as polite as could be.\nHe spoke to his wife in the door, 'Let me see,\nMarne, _we_ don't know any good berrying place?'\nIt was all he could do to keep a straight face.\"\n\n\"If he thinks all the fruit that grows wild is for him,\nHe'll find he's mistaken. See here, for a whim,\nWe'll pick in the Mortensons' pasture this year.\nWe'll go in the morning, that is, if it's clear,\nAnd the sun shines out warm: the vines must be\nwet.\nIt's so long since I picked I almost forget\nHow we used to pick berries: we took one look\nround,\nThen sank out of sight like trolls underground,\nAnd saw nothing more of each other, or heard,\nUnless when you said I was keeping a bird\nAway from its nest, and I said it was you.\n'Well, one of us is.' For complaining it flew\nAround and around us. And then for a while\nWe picked, till I feared you had wandered a mile,\nAnd I thought I had lost you. I lifted a shout\nToo loud for the distance you were, it turned out,\nFor when you made answer, your voice was as low\nAs talking—-you stood up beside me, you know.\"\n\n\"We shan't have the place to ourselves to enjoy—-\nNot likely, when all the young Lorens deploy.\nThey'll be there to-morrow, or even to-night.\nThey won't be too friendly—-they may be polite—-\nTo people they look on as having no right\nTo pick where they're picking. But we won't\ncomplain.\nYou ought to have seen how it looked in the rain,\nThe fruit mixed with water in layers of leaves,\nLike two kinds of jewels, a vision for thieves.\"",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Brown'S Descent Or, The Willy-Nilly Slide",
    "body": "Brown lived at such a lofty farm\nThat everyone for miles could see\nHis lantern when he did his chores\nIn winter after half-past three.\n\nAnd many must have seen him make\nHis wild descent from there one night,\n'Cross lots, 'cross walls, 'cross everything,\nDescribing rings of lantern light.\n\nBetween the house and barn the gale\nGot him by something he had on\nAnd blew him out on the icy crust\nThat cased the world, and he was gone!\n\nWalls were all buried, trees were few:\nHe saw no stay unless he stove\nA hole in somewhere with his heel.\nBut though repeatedly he strove\n\nAnd stamped and said things to himself,\nAnd sometimes something seemed to yield,\nHe gained no foothold, but pursued\nHis journey down from field to field.\n\nSometimes he came with arms outspread\nLike wings, revolving in the scene\nUpon his longer axis, and\nWith no small dignity of mien.\n\nFaster or slower as he chanced,\nSitting or standing as he chose,\nAccording as he feared to risk\nHis neck, or thought to spare his clothes,\n\nHe never let the lantern drop.\nAnd some exclaimed who saw afar\nThe figures he described with it,\n\"I wonder what those signals are\n\nBrown makes at such an hour of night!\nHe's celebrating something strange.\nI wonder if he's sold his farm,\nOr been made Master of the Grange.\"\n\nHe reeled, he lurched, he bobbed, he checked;\nHe fell and made the lantern rattle\n(But saved the light from going out).\nSo half-way down he fought the battle\n\nIncredulous of his own bad luck.\nAnd then becoming reconciled\nTo everything, he gave it up\nAnd came down like a coasting child.\n\n\"Well—-I-—be----\" that was all he said,\nAs standing in the river road,\nHe looked back up the slippery slope\n(Two miles it was) to his abode.\n\nSometimes as an authority\nOn motor-cars, I'm asked if I\nShould say our stock was petered out,\nAnd this is my sincere reply:\n\nYankees are what they always were.\nDon't think Brown ever gave up hope\nOf getting home again because\nHe couldn't climb that slippery slope;\n\nOr even thought of standing there\nUntil the January thaw\nShould take the polish off the crust.\nHe bowed with grace to natural law,\n\nAnd then went round it on his feet,\nAfter the manner of our stock;\nNot much concerned for those to whom,\nAt that particular time o'clock,\n\nIt must have looked as if the course\nHe steered was really straight away\nFrom that which he was headed for—-\nNot much concerned for them, I say.\n\nBut now he snapped his eyes three times;\nThen shook his lantern, saying, \"Ile's\n'Bout out!\" and took the long way home\nBy road, a matter of several miles.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Revelation",
    "body": "We make ourselves a place apart\nBehind light words that tease and flout,\nBut oh, the agitated heart\nTill someone really find us out.\n\nA pity if the case require\n(Or so we say) that in the end\nWe speak the literal to inspire\nThe understanding of a friend.\n\nBut so with all, from babes that play\nAt hide-and-seek to God afar,\nSo all who hide too well away\nMust speak and tell us where they are.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Storm-Fear",
    "body": "When the wind works against us in the dark,\nAnd pelts with snow\nThe lower chamber window on the east,\nAnd whispers with a sort of stifled bark,\nThe beast,\n\"Come out! Come out!\"—-\nIt costs no inward struggle not to go,\nAh, do!\nI count our strength,\nTwo and a child,\nThose of us not asleep subdued to mark\nHow the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,—-\nHow drifts are piled,\nDooryard and road ungraded,\nTill even the comforting barn grows far away,\nAnd my heart owns a doubt\nWhether 'tis in us to arise with day\nAnd save ourselves unaided.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Bond And Free",
    "body": "Love has earth to which she clings\nWith hills and circling arms about—-\nWall within wall to shut fear out.\nBut Thought has need of no such things,\nFor Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.\n\nOn snow and sand and turf, I see\nWhere Love has left a printed trace\nWith straining in the world's embrace.\nAnd such is Love and glad to be.\nBut thought has shaken his ankles free.\n\nThought cleaves the interstellar gloom\nAnd sits in Sirius' disc all night,\nTill day makes him retrace his flight,\nWith smell of burning on every plume,\nBack past the sun to an earthly room.\n\nHis gains in heaven are what they are.\nYet some say Love by being thrall\nAnd simply staying possesses all\nIn several beauty that Thought fares far\nTo find fused in another star.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Flower-Gathering",
    "body": "I left you in the morning,\nAnd in the morning glow,\nYou walked a way beside me\nTo make me sad to go.\nDo you know me in the gloaming,\nGaunt and dusty grey with roaming?\nAre you dumb because you know me not,\nOr dumb because you know?\n\nAll for me? And not a question\nFor the faded flowers gay\nThat could take me from beside you\nFor the ages of a day?\nThey are yours, and be the measure\nOf their worth for you to treasure,\nThe measure of the little while\nThat I've been long away.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Reluctance",
    "body": "Out through the fields and the woods\nAnd over the walls I have wended;\nI have climbed the hills of view\nAnd looked at the world, and descended;\nI have come by the highway home,\nAnd lo, it is ended.\n\nThe leaves are all dead on the ground,\nSave those that the oak is keeping\nTo ravel them one by one\nAnd let them go scraping and creeping\nOut over the crusted snow,\nWhen others are sleeping.\n\nAnd the dead leaves lie huddled and still,\nNo longer blown hither and thither;\nThe last lone aster is gone;\nThe flowers of the witch-hazel wither;\nThe heart is still aching to seek,\nBut the feet question \"Whither?\"\n\nAh, when to the heart of man\nWas it ever less than a treason\nTo go with the drift of things,\nTo yield with a grace to reason,\nAnd bow and accept the end\nOf a love or a season?",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  },
  {
    "title": "Into My Own",
    "body": "One of my wishes is that those dark trees,\nSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,\nWere not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,\nBut stretched away unto the edge of doom.\n\nI should not be withheld but that some day\nInto their vastness I should steal away,\nFearless of ever finding open land,\nOr highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.\n\nI do not see why I should e'er turn back,\nOr those should not set forth upon my track\nTo overtake me, who should miss me here\nAnd long to know if still I held them dear.\n\nThey would not find me changed from him they\nknew—-\nOnly more sure of all I thought was true.",
    "author": "Robert Frost",
    "source": "Selected Poems",
    "period": "1913–1916"
  }
]