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Robert Frost

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Robert Frost (1874–1963)

American Poet
  • Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
    That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
    And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
    And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
    • Mending Wall (1915)
  • Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
    What I was walling in or walling out,
    And to whom I was like to give offence.
    Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
    That wants it down.
    • Mending Wall (1915)
  • He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
    Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
    He will not go behind his father’s saying,
    And he likes having thought of it so well
    He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
    • Mending Wall (1915)
  • I’d like to get away from earth awhile
    And then come back to it and begin over.
    May no fate willfully misunderstand me
    And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
    Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
    I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
    • Birches (1920)
  • I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
    And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
    Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
    But dipped its top and set me down again.
    That would be good both going and coming back.
    One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
    • Birches (1920)
  • SOME say the world will end in fire,
    Some say in ice.
    From what I’ve tasted of desire
    I hold with those who favor fire.
    But if it had to perish twice,
    I think I know enough of hate
    To know that for destruction ice
    Is also great
    And would suffice.
    • Fire and Ice (1920)
  • Ah, when to the heart of man
    Was it ever less than a treason
    To go with the drift of things,
    To yield with a grace to reason,
    And bow and accept the end
    Of a love or a season?
    • Reluctance
  • Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace metaphors,' and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don't you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections - whether from diffidence or from some other instinct.
    • Education by Poetry (Essay)


The Road Not Taken (1916)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake,
The darkest evening of the year.
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.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.


from DIRECTIVE

  • Back out of all this now too much for us,
    Back in a time made simple by the loss
    Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
    Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
    There is a house that is no more a house
    Upon a farm that is no more a farm
    And in a town that is no more a town.

    The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
    Who only has at heart your getting lost,
    May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
    Great monolithic knees the former town
    Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
    And there's a story in a book about it…
  • As for the woods' excitement over you
    That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
    Charge that to upstart inexperience.

    Where were they all not twenty years ago?
    They think too much of having shaded out
    A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
  • The height of the adventure is the height
    Of country where two village cultures faded
    Into each other. Both of them are lost.

    And if you're lost enough to find yourself
    By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
    And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
  • First there's the children's house of make-believe,
    Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
    The playthings in the playhouse of the children.

    Weep for what little things could make them glad.
  • This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
    Your destination and your destiny's
    A brook that was the water of the house,
    Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
    Too lofty and original to rage.
  • (We know the valley streams that when aroused
    Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
  • I have kept hidden in the instep arch
    Of an old cedar at the waterside
    A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
    Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
    So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.

    (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
    Here are your waters and your watering place.
    Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

Attributed

  • "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life— It goes on."
  • "A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday... but never remembers her age."
  • "Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second."
  • "A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes"
  • "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
  • "Poetry is what gets lost in translation."

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Last updated: 10-26-2005 03:52:15