Mending Wall by Robert Frost

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MENDING WALL

by Robert Frost

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 neighbor 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 neighbors'.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors? 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 offense.

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 neighbors."

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Acceptance by Robert Frost

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Acceptance

by Robert Frost

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least must know

It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in her breast,

One bird begins to close a faded eye;

Or overtaken too far from his nest,

Hurrying low above the grove, some waif

Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!

Now let the night be dark for all of me.

Let the night be too dark for me to see

Into the future.

Let what will be, be.'

LITERATURE OUT LOUD

Click here for a complete INDEX

LITERATURE OUT LOUD -- see and hear great literature Audio narrations with synchronized visual text

The Complete Collection of

SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS

all 154 poems $3.99 DVD with FREE shipping

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The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

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The Road Not Taken
by 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.

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After Apple Picking by Robert Frost

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After Apple Picking
by Robert Frost



My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.



Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.



But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.



My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.



For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.



For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.



One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Biography Out Loud -- Robert Frost

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This author once said “By working faithfully eight hours a day you may eventually get to be a boss and work 12 hours a day.” Though he delivered newspapers and was a cobbler, farmer and the light bulb filament changer in a factory, he always felt his true calling was as a poet. He also worked as a teacher, and won four Pulitzer prizes for poetry.

He is renowned for his ability to capture rural life and colloquial language. Who is this rural poet, regarded as one of the most famous American authors? We’ll find out in a moment on:

Biography Out Loud

Robert Frost’s epitaph quotes a line from one of his poems: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Best known for his poem “The Road Not Taken”, the lines most often cited from this poem include “two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

He sold his first poem “My Butterfly: An Elegy”, at the age of 20 for fifteen dollars. This early success caused him to propose to Elinor. She refused this first proposal, but later agreed to marriage. They were in England when World War I broke out, and Robert Frost then returned with his family to what would be the family homestead. Frost met Ezra Pound while in England. Pound helped promote Robert Frost’s poetry by reviewing his first book of poetry, but their friendship waned in later years. Frost said of life, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.”

His father died when he was 11, his mother when he was 26, and he also had to commit his sister to an institution. He and his wife had six children, but was only survived by two daughters. He buried his wife in 1938. Though faced with much tragedy in his life, he said, “Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.” He also said, “The best way out is always through.”

He taught later in his life at the University of Michigan and received more than 40 honorary degrees in his lifetime. Of education he once said, “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.”

Robert Frost performed a reading of his poetry at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy at the age of eighty-six. Frost enjoyed reading his works, and once said, “I look at a poem as a performance.” Of Robert Frost, President Kennedy said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

His use of common language to communicate in poetry makes Frost one of the most famous American poets. His wit has also been frequently quoted. He once said, “A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”

He worked on various farms his entire life, commenting he had no regular writing schedule. he said, “I don’t have hours; I don’t work at it, you know. I’m not a farmer, that’s no pose of mine. But I have farmed some, and I putter around. And I walk and live with other people. Like to talk a lot.”

Though his life was checkered with loss, he once said, “I never knew how many disadvantages anyone needed to get anywhere in the world. No psychology will ever tell you who needs a whip and who needs a spur to win races.”

When asked once about the creative process, Robert Frost said, “It’s just the same as when you feel a joke coming. You see somebody coming down the street that you’re accustomed to abuse, and feel it rising in you, something to say as you pass each other. Coming over him the same way. And where do these thoughts come from?”

In 1942, Robert Frost received his fourth Pulitzer prize for his book “A Winter Tree” He is the first person to win four Pulitzer prizes. He also once had patchwork quilts made from the academic hoods he had received with his honorary degrees.

In a memorable couplet, Frost once said, “It’s from their having stood contrasted, That good and bad so long have lasted.”

Frost was born in 1874, but maintained his entire life he was born in 1875. His friends threw a 50th birthday party for him as he turned fifty-one, and he was honored by the US Senate for his 75th birthday, although he was seventy-six. Robert Frost, one of the most accomplished American poets, died in 1963.

He once quipped, “Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.”

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

This is another episode of “Literature Out Loud” from the weekly program “Abundance”. As the host, Dane Allred reads selections from famous literature each week on www.k-talk.com from 7 to 8 pm Mountain Standard Time every Sunday. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Dane Allred” includes 33 audio episodes and a free book is available on eBay.

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Click on the player above to hear an audio version of this poem.
MENDING WALL
by Robert Frost



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 neighbor 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 neighbors’.

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

‘Why do they make good neighbors? 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 offense.

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 neighbors.”

Birches by Robert Frost

This is another episode of "Literature Out Loud" from the weekly program "Abundance". As the host, Dane Allred reads selections from famous literature each week on www.k-talk.com from 7 to 8 pm Mountain Standard Time every Sunday. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Dane Allred” includes 33 audio episodes and a free book is available on eBay.

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Click on the player above to hear an audio version of this poem.



Birches
by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
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.
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.

Acceptance by Robert Frost

Dane Allred celebrates "Abundance" by reading from great literature.

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Click on the player to hear an audio version of this poem.

Acceptance by Robert Frost

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.'