Additional Poems By Robert Frost Essay Research

And threw their lurching shadows on a house

Near by, all dark in every glossy window.

A horse’s hoof pawed once the hollow floor,

And the back of the gig they stood beside

Moved in a little. The man grasped a wheel,

The woman spoke out sharply, “Whoa, stand still!”

“I saw it just as plain as a white plate,”

She said, “as the light on the dashboard ran

Along the bushes at the roadside—a man’s face.

You must have seen it too.”

“I didn’t see it.

Are you sure——”

“Yes, I’m sure!”

“—it was a face?”

“Joel, I’ll have to look. I can’t go in,

I can’t, and leave a thing like that unsettled.

Doors locked and curtains drawn will make no difference.

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.

What if I’m right, and someone all the time—

Don’t hold my arm!”

“I say it’s someone passing.”

“You speak as if this were a travelled road.

You forget where we are. What is beyond

That he’d be going to or coming from

At such an hour of night, and on foot too.

What was he standing still for in the bushes?”

“It’s not so very late—it’s only dark.

There’s more in it than you’re inclined to say.

Did he look like——?”

“He looked like anyone.

I’ll never rest to-night unless I know.

Give me the lantern.”

“You don’t want the lantern.”

She pushed past him and got it for herself.

“You’re not to come,” she said. “This is my business.

If the time’s come to face it, I’m the one

To put it the right way. He’d never dare—

Listen! He kicked a stone. Hear that, hear that!

He’s coming towards us. Joel, go in—please.

Hark!—I don’t hear him now. But please go in.”

“In the first place you can’t make me believe it’s——”

“It is—or someone else he’s sent to watch.

And now’s the time to have it out with him

While we know definitely where he is.

Let him get off and he’ll be everywhere

Around us, looking out of trees and bushes

Till I sha’n’t dare to set a foot outdoors.

And I can’t stand it. Joel, let me go!”

“But it’s nonsense to think he’d care enough.”

“You mean you couldn’t understand his caring.

Oh, but you see he hadn’t had enough—

Joel, I won’t—I won’t—I promise you.

We mustn’t say hard things. You mustn’t either.”

“I’ll be the one, if anybody goes!

But you give him the advantage with this light.

What couldn’t he do to us standing here!

And if to see was what he wanted, why

He has seen all there was to see and gone.”

He appeared to forget to keep his hold,

But advanced with her as she crossed the grass.

“What do you want?” she cried to all the dark.

She stretched up tall to overlook the light

That hung in both hands hot against her skirt.

“There’s no one; so you’re wrong,” he said.

“There is.—

What do you want?” she cried, and then herself

Was startled when an answer really came.

“Nothing.” It came from well along the road.

She reached a hand to Joel for support:

The smell of scorching woollen made her faint.

“What are you doing round this house at night?”

“Nothing.” A pause: there seemed no more to say.

And then the voice again: “You seem afraid.

I saw by the way you whipped up the horse.

I’ll just come forward in the lantern light

And let you see.”

“Yes, do.—Joel, go back!”

She stood her ground against the noisy steps

That came on, but her body rocked a little.

“You see,” the voice said.

“Oh.” She looked and looked.

“You don’t see—I’ve a child here by the hand.”

“What’s a child doing at this time of night——?”

“Out walking. Every child should have the memory

Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.

What, son?”

“Then I should think you’d try to find

Somewhere to walk——”

“The highway as it happens—

We’re stopping for the fortnight down at Dean’s.”

“But if that’s all—Joel—you realize—

You won’t think anything. You understand?

You understand that we have to be careful.

This is a very, very lonely place.

Joel!” She spoke as if she couldn’t turn.

The swinging lantern lengthened to the ground,

It touched, it struck it, clattered and went out.

from North of Boston (1915)

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Christmas Trees

(A Christmas Circular Letter)

The city had withdrawn into itself

And left at last the country to the country;

When between whirls of snow not come to lie

And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove

A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,

Yet did in country fashion in that there

He sat and waited till he drew us out

A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.

He proved to be the city come again

To look for something it had left behind

And could not do without and keep its Christmas.

He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;

My woods—the young fir balsams like a place

Where houses all are churches and have spires.

I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.

I doubt if I was tempted for a moment

To sell them off their feet to go in cars

And leave the slope behind the house all bare,

Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.

I’d hate to have them know it if I was.

Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except

As others hold theirs or refuse for them,

Beyond the time of profitable growth,

The trial by market everything must come to.

I dallied so much with the thought of selling.

Then whether from mistaken courtesy

And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether

From hope of hearing good of what was mine,

I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”

“I could soon tell how many they would cut,

You let me look them over.”

“You could look.

But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”

Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close

That lop each other of boughs, but not a few

Quite solitary and having equal boughs

All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,

Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,

With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”

I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.

We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,

And came down on the north.

He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

He felt some need of softening that to me:

“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

Then I was certain I had never meant

To let him have them. Never show surprise!

But thirty dollars seemed so small beside

The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents

(For that was all they figured out apiece),

Three cents so small beside the dollar friends

I should be writing to within the hour

Would pay in cities for good trees like those,

Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools

Could hang enough on to pick off enough.

A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!

Worth three cents more to give away than sell,

As may be shown by a simple calculation.

Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.

I can’t help wishing I could send you one,

In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

from Mountain Interval (1920)

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Hyla Brook

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

from Mountain Interval (1920)

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Range-finding

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung

And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest

Before it stained a single human breast.

The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

And still the bird revisited her young.

A butterfly its fall had dispossessed

A moment sought in air his flower of rest,

Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread

O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread

And straining cables wet with silver dew.

A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.

The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,

But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

from Mountain Interval (1920)

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“Out, Out—”

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off—

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

from Mountain Interval (1920)

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The Ax-helve

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch

Of alder catch my lifted ax behind me.

But that was in the woods, to hold my hand

From striking at another alder’s roots,

And that was, as I say, an alder branch.

This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day

Behind me on the snow in my own yard

Where I was working at the chopping-block,

And cutting nothing not cut down already.

He caught my ax expertly on the rise,

When all my strength put forth was in his favor,

Held it a moment where it was, to calm me,

Then took it from me—and I let him take it.

I didn’t know him well enough to know

What it was all about. There might be something

He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor

He might prefer to say to him disarmed.

But all he had to tell me in French-English

Was what he thought of—not me, but my ax,

Me only as I took my ax to heart.

It was the bad ax-helve someone had sold me—

“Made on machine,” he said, plowing the grain

With a think thumbnail to show how it ran

Across the handle’s long-drawn serpentine—

Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.

“You give her one good crack, she’s snap raght off.

Den where’s your hax-ead flying t’rough de hair?”

Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?

“Come on my house and I put you one in

What’s las’ awhile—good hick’ry what’s grow crooked.

De second growt’ I cut myself—tough, tough!”

Something to sell? That wasn’t how it sounded.

“Den when you say you come? It’s cost you nothing.

Tonaght?

As well tonight as any night.

Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove

My welcome differed from no other welcome.

Baptiste knew best why I was where I was.

So long as he would leave enough unsaid,

I shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed

(If overjoyed he was) at having got me

Where I must judge if what he knew about an ax

That not everybody else knew was to count

For nothing in the measure of a neighbor.

Hard if, though cast away for life ’mid Yankees,

A Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating!

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair

That had as many motions as the world:

One back and forward, in and out of shadow,

That got her nowhere; one more gradual,

Sideways, that would have run her on the stove

In time, had she not realized her danger

And caught herself up bodily, chair and all,

And set herself back where she started from.

“She ain’t spick too much Henglish—dat’s too bad.”

I was afraid, in brightening first on me,

Then on Baptiste, as if she understood

What passed between us, she was only feigning.

Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more

Than for himself, so placed he couldn’t hope

To keep his bargain of the morning with me

In time to keep me from suspecting him

Of really never having meant to keep it.

Needlessly soon he had his ax-helves out,

A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me

To have the best he had, or had to spare—

Not for me to ask which, when what he took

Had beauties he had to point me out at length

To insure their not being wasted on me.

He liked to have it slender as a whipstock,

Free from the least knot, equal to the strain

Of bending like a sword across the knee.

He showed me that the lines of a good helve

Were native to the grain before the knife

Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves

Put on it from without. And there its strength lay

For the hard work. He chafed its long white body

From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.

He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head.

“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”

Baptiste knew how to make a short job long

For love of it, and yet not waste time either.

Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?

Baptiste on his defense about the children

He kept from school, or did his best to keep—

Whatever school and children and our doubts

Of laid-on education had to do

With the curves of his ax-helves and his having

Used these unscrupulously to bring me

To see for once the inside of his house.

Was I desired in friendship, partly as someone

To leave it to, whether the right to hold

Such doubts of education should depend

Upon the education of those who held them?

But now he brushed the shavings from his knee

And stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof,

Erect, but not without its waves, as when

The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,—

Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,

Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down

And in a little—a French touch in that.

Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased;

“See how she’s cock her head!”

from New Hampshire (1923)

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