Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval

by Robert Frost

  Only when someone’s coming, and the mare

  Stops when she likes: I tell her when to go.

  I’ve spoiled Jemima in more ways than one.

  She’s got so she turns in at every house

  As if she had some sort of curvature,

  No matter if I have no errand there.

  She thinks I’m sociable. I maybe am.

  It’s seldom I get down except for meals, though.

  Folks entertain me from the kitchen doorstep,

  All in a family row down to the youngest.”

  “One would suppose they might not be as glad

  To see you as you are to see them.”

  “Oh,

  Because I want their dollar. I don’t want

  Anything they’ve not got. I never dun.

  I’m there, and they can pay me if they like.

  I go nowhere on purpose: I happen by.

  Sorry there is no cup to give you a drink.

  I drink out of the bottle—not your style.

  Mayn’t I offer you——?”

  “No, no, no, thank you.”

  “Just as you say. Here’s looking at you then.—

  And now I’m leaving you a little while.

  You’ll rest easier when I’m gone, perhaps—

  Lie down—let yourself go and get some sleep.

  But first—let’s see—what was I going to ask you?

  Those collars—who shall I address them to,

  Suppose you aren’t awake when I come back?”

  “Really, friend, I can’t let you. You—may need them.”

  “Not till I shrink, when they’ll be out of style.”

  “But really I—I have so many collars.”

  “I don’t know who I rather would have have them.

  They’re only turning yellow where they are.

  But you’re the doctor as the saying is.

  I’ll put the light out. Don’t you wait for me:

  I’ve just begun the night. You get some sleep.

  I’ll knock so-fashion and peep round the door

  When I come back so you’ll know who it is.

  There’s nothing I’m afraid of like scared people.

  I don’t want you should shoot me in the head.

  What am I doing carrying off this bottle?

  There now, you get some sleep.”

  He shut the door.

  The Doctor slid a little down the pillow.

  Home Burial

  He saw her from the bottom of the stairs

  Before she saw him. She was starting down,

  Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.

  She took a doubtful step and then undid it

  To raise herself and look again. He spoke

  Advancing toward her: “What is it you see

  From up there always—for I want to know.”

  She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,

  And her face changed from terrified to dull.

  He said to gain time: “What is it you see,”

  Mounting until she cowered under him.

  “I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.”

  She, in her place, refused him any help

  With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.

  She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,

  Blind creature; and a while he didn’t see.

  But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again, “Oh.”

  “What is it—what?” she said.

  “Just that I see.”

  “You don’t,” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”

  “The wonder is I didn’t see at once.

  I never noticed it from here before.

  I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.

  The little graveyard where my people are!

  So small the window frames the whole of it.

  Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?

  There are three stones of slate and one of marble,

  Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight

  On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.

  But I understand: it is not the stones,

  But the child’s mound——”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried.

  She withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm

  That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;

  And turned on him with such a daunting look,

  He said twice over before he knew himself:

  “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”

  “Not you! Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it!

  I must get out of here. I must get air.

  I don’t know rightly whether any man can.”

  “Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.

  Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.”

  He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.

  “There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.”

  “You don’t know how to ask it.”

  “Help me, then.”

  Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.

  “My words are nearly always an offence.

  I don’t know how to speak of anything

  So as to please you. But I might be taught

  I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.

  A man must partly give up being a man

  With women-folk. We could have some arrangement

  By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off

  Anything special you’re a-mind to name.

  Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.

  Two that don’t love can’t live together without them.

  But two that do can’t live together with them.”

  She moved the latch a little. “Don’t—don’t go.

  Don’t carry it to someone else this time.

  Tell me about it if it’s something human.

  Let me into your grief. I’m not so much

  Unlike other folks as your standing there

  Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.

  I do think, though, you overdo it a little.

  What was it brought you up to think it the thing

  To take your mother-loss of a first child

  So inconsolably—in the face of love.

  You’d think his memory might be satisfied——”

  “There you go sneering now!”

  “I’m not, I’m not!

  You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.

  God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,

  A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.”

  “You can’t because you don’t know how.

  If you had any feelings, you that dug

  With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;

  I saw you from that very window there,

  Making the gravel leap and leap in air,

  Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly

  And roll back down the mound beside the hole.

  I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.

  And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs

  To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.

  Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice

  Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,

  But I went near to see with my own eyes.

  You could sit there with the stains on your shoes

  Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave

  And talk about your everyday concerns.

  You had stood the spade up against the wall

  Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”

  “I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

  I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”

  “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 parlour.

  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.

  No, from the time when one is sick to death,

  One is alone, and he dies more alone.

  Friends make pretence of following to the grave,

  But before one is in it, their minds are turned

  And making the best of their way back to life

  And living people, and things they understand.

  But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so

  If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!”

  “There, you have said it all and you feel better.

  You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.

  The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up.

  Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!”

  “You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—

  Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you——”

  “If—you—do!” She was opening the door wider.

  Where do you mean to go? First tell me that.

  I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—”

  The Black Cottage

  We chanced in passing by that afternoon

  To catch it in a sort of special picture

  Among tar-banded ancient cherry trees,

  Set well back from the road in rank lodged grass,

  The little cottage we were speaking of,

  A front with just a door between two windows,

  Fresh painted by the shower a velvet black.

  We paused, the minister and I, to look.

  He made as if to hold it at arm’s length

  Or put the leaves aside that framed it in.

  “Pretty,” he said. “Come in. No one will care.”

  The path was a vague parting in the grass

  That led us to a weathered window-sill.

  We pressed our faces to the pane. “You see,” he said,

  “Everything’s as she left it when she died.

  Her sons won’t sell the house or the things in it.

  They say they mean to come and summer here

  Where they were boys. They haven’t come this year.

  They live so far away—one is out west—

  It will be hard for them to keep their word.

  Anyway they won’t have the place disturbed.”

  A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms

  Under a crayon portrait on the wall

  Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.

  “That was the father as he went to war.

  She always, when she talked about war,

  Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt

  Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt

  If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir

  Anything in her after all the years.

  He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,

  I ought to know—it makes a difference which:

  Fredericksburg wasn’t Gettysburg, of course.

  But what I’m getting to is how forsaken

  A little cottage this has always seemed;

  Since she went more than ever, but before—

  I don’t mean altogether by the lives

  That had gone out of it, the father first,

  Then the two sons, till she was left alone.

  (Nothing could draw her after those two sons.

  She valued the considerate neglect

  She had at some cost taught them after years.)

  I mean by the world’s having passed it by—

  As we almost got by this afternoon.

  It always seems to me a sort of mark

  To measure how far fifty years have brought us.

  Why not sit down if you are in no haste?

  These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.

  The warping boards pull out their own old nails

  With none to tread and put them in their place.

  She had her own idea of things, the old lady.

  And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison

  And Whittier, and had her story of them.

  One wasn’t long in learning that she thought

  Whatever else the Civil War was for

  It wasn’t just to keep the States together,

  Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.

  She wouldn’t have believed those ends enough

  To have given outright for them all she gave.

  Her giving somehow touched the principle

  That all men are created free and equal.

  And to hear her quaint phrases—so removed

  From the world’s view to-day of all those things.

  That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.

  What did he mean? Of course the easy way

  Is to decide it simply isn’t true.

  It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.

  But never mind, the Welshman got it planted

  Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

  Each age will have to reconsider it.

  You couldn’t tell her what the West was saying,

  And what the South to her serene belief.

  She had some art of hearing and yet not

  Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.

  White was the only race she ever knew.

  Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.

  But how could they be made so very unlike

  By the same hand working in the same stuff?

  She had supposed the war decided that.

  What are you going to do with such a person?

  Strange how such innocence gets its own way.

  I shouldn’t be surprised if in this world

  It were the force that would at last prevail.

  Do you know but for her there was a time

  When to please younger members of the church,

  Or rather say non-members in the church,

  Whom we all have to think of nowadays,

  I would have changed the Creed a very little?

  Not that she ever had to ask me not to;

  It never got so far as that; but the bare thought

  Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,

  And of her half asleep was too much for me.

  Why, I might wake her up and startle her.

  It was the words ‘descended into Hades’

  That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.

  You know they suffered from a general onslaught.

  And well, if they weren’t true why keep right on

  Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.

  Only—there was the bonnet in the pew.

  Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.

  But suppose she had missed it from the Creed

  As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,

  And falls asleep with heartache—how should I feel?

  I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,

  For, dear me, why abandon a belief

  Merely because it ceases to be true.

  Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

  It will turn true again, for so it goes.

  Most of the change we think we see in life

  Is due to truths being in and out of favour.

  As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish

  I could be monarch of a desert land

  I could devote and dedicate forever

  To the truths we keep coming back and back to.

  So desert it would have to be, so walled

  By mountain ranges half in summer snow,

  No one would covet it or think it worth

  The pains of conquering to force change on.

  Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly


  Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk

  Blown over and over themselves in idleness.

  Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew

  The babe born to the desert, the sand storm

  Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans—

  There are bees in this wall.” He struck the clapboards,

  Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.

  We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.

  Blueberries

  “You ought to have seen what I saw on my way

  To the village, through Mortenson’s pasture to-day:

  Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,

  Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum

  In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!

  And all ripe together, not some of them green

  And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!”

  “I don’t know what part of the pasture you mean.”

  “You know where they cut off the woods—let me see—

  It was two years ago—or no!—can it be

  No longer than that?—and the following fall

  The fire ran and burned it all up but the wall.”

  “Why, there hasn’t been time for the bushes to grow.

  That’s always the way with the blueberries, though:

  There may not have been the ghost of a sign

  Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine,

  But get the pine out of the way, you may burn

  The pasture all over until not a fern

  Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick,

  And presto, they’re up all around you as thick

  And hard to explain as a conjuror’s trick.”

  “It must be on charcoal they fatten their fruit.

  I taste in them sometimes the flavour of soot.

  And after all really they’re ebony skinned:

  The blue’s but a mist from the breath of the wind,

  A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand,

  And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned.”

  “Does Mortenson know what he has, do you think?”

  “He may and not care and so leave the chewink

  To gather them for him—you know what he is.

  He won’t make the fact that they’re rightfully his