Robert Frost: Late Poems

Robert

FROST Late Poems

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C H A RY B D I S P R E S S new york

Published by Charybdis Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America 15 14 13 12

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Our mission at Charybdis Press is to publish books of poetry, art and literature. Charybdis Press believes in the necessity of these art forms to enrich our everday lives and to help access our creative potential. It is our desire to promote classic and contemporary works by poets, artists and writers in dynamic books that showcase their talents and open a dialogue for change and exchange with our readers.

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The editors of the Read More Poetry Series understand that because poetry is no longer taught in schools or critically reviewed as a viable art form, new readers, unfamiliar with poetry’s demands, will find the world of poetry difficult to access. The Read More Poetry Series was created to bring poetry to the public in a portable and affordable form to make poetry more accessible and to open the door to the rich resources of our poetic heritage.

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

–Frost

Epitaph on his tombstone from The Lesson for Today

Contents from New Hampshire (1923) Nothing Gold Can Stay Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening For Once, Then, Something To Earthward from West-Running Brook (1928) Spring Pools Tree at My Window Acquainted with the Night from A Further Range (1936) Desert Places Design from A Witness Tree (1942) The Most of It Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same The Subverted Flower A Considerable Speck from Steeple Bush (1947) Directive

Nothing Gold Can Stay Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening 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.

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He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there was 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.

For Once, Then, Something Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike, Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

Once, when trying with chin against well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Though the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

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One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

To Earthward Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air That crossed me from sweet things, The flow of—was it musk From hidden grapevine springs Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache From sprays of honeysuckle That when they’re gathered shake Dew on the knuckle.

I crave strong sweets , but those 5

Seemed strong when I was young; The petal of the rose It was that stung.

Now no joy lacks but salt, That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand From leaning on it hard In grass and sand, The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength To feel the earth as rough To all my length.

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Spring Pools These pools, though in forests, still reflect The total sky almost without defect, And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone, And yet not out by any brook or river, But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds To darken nature and be summer woods— Let them think twice before they lose their powers To blot out and drink up and sweep away These flowery waters and watery flowers From snow that melted only yesterday.

Tree at My Window 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.

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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.

Acquainted with the Night I have been acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat 8

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street, But not to call me back or say good-by; And further still at an unearthly height One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

Desert Places Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost coered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count; 9

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less— A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places.

Design I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth— A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

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What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought that kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?­— If design govern in a thing so small.

The Most of It He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response.

And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff’s talus on the other side, And then in the far-distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared 11

And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same He would declare and would himself believe That the birds there in all the garden round From having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of meaning but without the words.

Admittedly an eloquence so soft Could only have had an influence on birds When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song.

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost.

Never again would birds’ song be the same.

And to do that to birds was why she came.

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The Subverted Flower She drew back; he was calm: “It is this that had the power.”

And he lashed his open palm With the tender-headed flower.

He smiled for her to smile, But she was either blind Or willfully unkind.

He eyed her for a while For a woman and a puzzle.

He flicked and flung the flower, And another sort of smile Caught up like fingertips The corner of his lips And cracked his ragged muzzle.

She was standing to the waist In goldenrod and brake, Her shining hair displaced.

He stretched her either arm As if she made it ache To clasp her—not to harm; As if he could not spare To touch her neck and hair.

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“If this has come to us And not to me alone——” So she thought she heard him say; Though with every word he spoke His lips were sucked and blown And the effort made him choke Like a tiger at a bone.

She had to lean away.

She dared not stir a foot, Lest movement should provoke The demon of pursuit That slumbers in a brute.

It was then her mother’s call From inside the garden wall Made her steal a look of fear To see if he could hear And would pounce to end it all Before her mother came.

She looked and saw the shame: A hand hung like a paw, An arm worked like a saw As if to be persuasive, An ingratiating laugh That cut the snout in half, 14

An eye become evasive.

A girl could only see That a flower marred a man, But what she could not see Was that the flower might be Other than base and fetid: That a flower had done but part, And what the flower began Her own too meager heart Had terribly completed.

She looked and saw the worst.

And the dog or what it was, Obeying bestial laws, A coward save at night, Turned from the place and ran.

She heard him stumble first And use his hands in flight.

She heard him bark outright.

And, oh, for one so young The bitter words she spit Like some tenacious bit That will not leave the tongue.

She plucked her lips for it, And still the horror clung.

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Her mother wiped the foam From her chin, picked up her comb, And drew her backward home.

A Considerable Speck (Microscopic) A speck that would have been beneath my sight On any but a paper sheet so white Set off across what I had written there.

And I had idly poised my pen in air To stop it with a period of ink, When something strange about it made me think.

This was no dust speck by my breathing blown, But unmistakably a living mite With inclinations it could call its own.

It paused with suspicion of my pen, And then came racing wildly on again To where my manuscript was not yet dry; Then paused again and either drank or smelt— With loathing, for again it turned to fly.

Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.

I seemed too tiny to have room for feet, Yet must have had a set of them complete 16

To express how much it didn’t want to die.

It ran with terror and with cunning crept.

It faltered: I could see it hesitate; Then in the middle of the open sheet Cower down in desperation to accept Whatever I accorded it of fate.

I have none of the tenderer-than-thou Collectivistic regimenting love With which the modern world is being swept.

But this poor microscopic item now!

Since it was nothing I knew evil of I let it le there till I hope it slept.

I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise.

No one can know how glad I am to find On any sheet the least display of mind.

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 17

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: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels The ledges show lines ruled southeast-nortwest, The chisel work of an enormous Glacier That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.

You must not mind a certain coolness from him Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal Of being watched from forty cellar holes As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.

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 18

A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.

Make up ourself a cheering song of how Someone’s road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.

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.

Then make yourself at home. The only field Now left’s no biger than a harness gall.

First there’s the children’s houses of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of children.

Weep for what little things could make them glad.

Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.

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, 19

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.

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Robert Frost

(March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963)

Robert Frost might be America’s most well known poet.

There was something in his use of colloquial speech, farm life and plain folk wisdom that drenches his poetry in the nostalgia of a snowswept New England at the turn of the twentieth century. On the surface, Frost appears to be a simple country rhymer, but, on closer inspection, beneath the rime, is a dark and complex poet writing about the inner world of the individual inescapably a part of a vast, indifferent outer world. Within his poems, we find the hard lives of hard people finding, for a moment, a sensitivity and softness in a glimmer of hope that vanishes as quickly as it appears. It is in this interval, between hard and soft, dark and light, where Frost’s poems exist as a brief respite in a life surrounded by struggle, death, madness and loss. In the same way, Frost himself sits Janus-like at the threshold of traditional American poetry and the Modernist tradition that he was, no doubt, a part.

Captured here are poems from across Frost’s collected works spanning from the time just before the Great War and America’s rise to global power after World War II.

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