Poem – Mending Wall

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.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
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.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
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.”

Poem – October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if the were all,
Whose elaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the all.

Two Tramps In Mud Time – Robert Frost

Out of the mud two strangers came 

And caught me splitting wood in the yard, 

And one of them put me off my aim 

By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!” 

I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind 

And let the other go on a way. 

I knew pretty well what he had in mind: 

He wanted to take my job for pay. 
Good blocks of oak it was I split, 

As large around as the chopping block; 

And every piece I squarely hit 

Fell splinterless as a cloven rock. 

The blows that a life of self-control 

Spares to strike for the common good, 

That day, giving a loose my soul, 

I spent on the unimportant wood. 
The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 

You know how it is with an April day 

When the sun is out and the wind is still, 

You’re one month on in the middle of May. 

But if you so much as dare to speak, 

A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, 

A wind comes off a frozen peak, 

And you’re two months back in the middle of March. 
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight 

And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume, 

His song so pitched as not to excite 

A single flower as yet to bloom. 

It is snowing a flake; and he half knew 

Winter was only playing possum. 

Except in color he isn’t blue, 

But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom. 
The water for which we may have to look 

In summertime with a witching wand, 

In every wheelrut’s now a brook, 

In every print of a hoof a pond. 

Be glad of water, but don’t forget 

The lurking frost in the earth beneath 

That will steal forth after the sun is set 

And show on the water its crystal teeth. 
The time when most I loved my task 

The two must make me love it more 

By coming with what they came to ask. 

You’d think I never had felt before 

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, 

The grip of earth on outspread feet, 

The life of muscles rocking soft 

And smooth and moist in vernal heat. 
Out of the wood two hulking tramps 

(From sleeping God knows where last night, 

But not long since in the lumber camps). 

They thought all chopping was theirs of right. 

Men of the woods and lumberjacks, 

They judged me by their appropriate tool. 

Except as a fellow handled an ax 

They had no way of knowing a fool. 
Nothing on either side was said. 

They knew they had but to stay their stay 
And all their logic would fill my head: 

As that I had no right to play 

With what was another man’s work for gain. 

My right might be love but theirs was need. 

And where the two exist in twain 

Theirs was the better right–agreed. 
But yield who will to their separation, 

My object in living is to unite 

My avocation and my vocation 

As my two eyes make one in sight. 

Only where love and need are one, 

And the work is play for mortal stakes, 

Is the deed ever really done 

For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

Unharvested – Robert Frost

A scent of ripeness from over a wall. 

And come to leave the routine road 

And look for what had made me stall, 

There sure enough was an apple tree 

That had eased itself of its summer load, 

And of all but its trivial foliage free, 

Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan. 

For there had been an apple fall 

As complete as the apple had given man. 

The ground was one circle of solid red. 
May something go always unharvested! 

May much stay out of our stated plan, 

Apples or something forgotten and left, 

So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

Tree At My Window -Robert Frost

Tree at my window, window tree, 

My sash is lowered when night comes on; 

But let there never be curtain drawn 

Between you and me. 
Vague dream head lifted out of the ground, 

And thing next most diffuse to cloud, 

Not all your light tongues talking aloud 

Could be profound. 
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed, 

And if you have seen me when I slept, 

You have seen me when I was taken and swept 

And all but lost. 
That day she put our heads together, 

Fate had her imagination about her, 

Your head so much concerned with outer, 

Mine with inner, weather.

Wind And Window Flower – Robert Frost

Lovers, forget your love, 

And list to the love of these, 

She a window flower, 

And he a winter breeze. 

When the frosty window veil 

Was melted down at noon, 

And the cagèd yellow bird 

Hung over her in tune, 

He marked her through the pane, 

He could not help but mark, 

And only passed her by, 

To come again at dark. 

He was a winter wind, 

Concerned with ice and snow, 

Dead weeds and unmated birds, 

And little of love could know. 

But he sighed upon the sill, 

He gave the sash a shake, 

As witness all within 

Who lay that night awake. 

Perchance he half prevailed 

To win her for the flight 

From the firelit looking-glass 

And warm stove-window light. 

But the flower leaned aside 

And thought of naught to say, 

And morning found the breeze 

A hundred miles away.

Poem – Misgiving – Robert Frost

All crying, ‘We will go with you, O Wind!’ 

The foliage follow him, leaf and stem; 

But a sleep oppresses them as they go, 

And they end by bidding them as they go, 

And they end by bidding him stay with them. 
Since ever they flung abroad in spring 

The leaves had promised themselves this flight, 

Who now would fain seek sheltering wall, 

Or thicket, or hollow place for the night. 
And now they answer his summoning blast 

With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir, 

Or at utmost a little reluctant whirl 

That drops them no further than where they were. 
I only hope that when I am free 

As they are free to go in quest 

Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life 

It may not seem better to me to rest.

Poem – Bond and Free – Robert Frost

Love has earth to which she clings With hills and circling arms about- 

Wall within wall to shut fear out. 

But Thought has need of no such things, 

For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings. 
On snow and sand and turn, I see 

Where Love has left a printed trace 

With straining in the world’s embrace. 

And such is Love and glad to be 

But Thought has shaken his ankles free. 
Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom 

And sits in Sirius’ disc all night, 

Till day makes him retrace his flight 

With smell of burning on every plume, 

Back past the sun to an earthly room. 
His gains in heaven are what they are. 

Yet some say Love by being thrall 

And simply staying possesses all 

In several beauty that Thought fares far 

To find fused in another star.

Poem – A Boundless Moment – Robert Frost

He halted in the wind, and – what was that 

Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost? 

He stood there bringing March against his thought, 

And yet too ready to believe the most. 
‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,’ I said; 

And truly it was fair enough for flowers 

had we but in us to assume in march 

Such white luxuriance of May for ours. 
We stood a moment so in a strange world, 

Myself as one his own pretense deceives; 

And then I said the truth (and we moved on) . 

A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.

Poem -A Time to Talk – Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road 

And slows his horse to a meaning walk, 

I don’t stand still and look around 

On all the hills I haven’t hoed, 

And shout from where I am, What is it? 

No, not as there is a time to talk. 

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, 

Blade-end up and five feet tall, 

And plod: I go up to the stone wall 

For a friendly visit.

Poem – A Soldier – Robert Frost

He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled, 

That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust, 

But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust. 

If we who sight along it round the world, 

See nothing worthy to have been its mark, 

It is because like men we look too near, 

Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere, 

Our missiles always make too short an arc. 

They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect 

The curve of earth, and striking, break their own; 

They make us cringe for metal-point on stone. 

But this we know, the obstacle that checked 

And tripped the body, shot the spirit on 

Further than target ever showed or shone.

English Poem – Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening – Robert Frost

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.

English Poem – The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

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.