Robert Frost (1874 – 1963)
American poet; winner of four Pulitzer Prizes.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
I always have felt strange when we came home
To the dark house after so long an absence,
And the key rattled loudly into place
Seemed to warn someone to be getting out
At one door as we entered at another.
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people.
Till we came to be
There was not a trace
Of a thinking race
Anywhere in space.
All those who try to go it sole alone,
Too proud to be beholden for relief,
Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
The world has room to make a bear feel free;
The universe seems cramped to you and me.
It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has. Some cognizance of the fact must be taken in your teaching.
It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.
People are inexterminable — like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices — that’s us.
Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting … Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
'I can repeat the very words you were saying:
"Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build."
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
You couldn't care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
How many times it thundered before Franklin took the hint! How many apples fell on Newton's head before he took the hint! Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint.
How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.
I have to be gone for a season or so.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.