Friends of Robert Frost

02/09/2024

On this crisp February morning, I keep thinking of snow that used to blanket the northern climes of this country for so many winter days. Then I think of "Stopping by Woods ..." and noting how it was written in the early morning hours of June 1922 on the back porch of this Old Stone House. He once wrote to Louis Untermeyer that this piece was, "my best bid for remembrance."

Stopping By 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 q***r
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 sounds 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.

01/06/2023

Posted this on Christmas's Past...enjoy throughout the season!

Christmas Trees
Robert Frost - 1874-1963

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The city had withdrawn into itself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.

10/21/2022

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.

From The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1942, 1951 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1970, 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

12/01/2021

On this giving Tuesday, as we wrap up Indigenous Peoples Month, it might be time to revisit...

The Gift Outright

BY ROBERT FROST

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

Source: The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt & Co., 1969)

01/18/2021

Thought the following might be appropriate to post in this contentious inaugural week, as Frost read himself, sixty years to the day on January 20, 1960, at the dawning of "Camelot," and the Kennedys, and an ideal we looked forward to celebrating every four years called Democracy.

"The Gift Outright"
Poem recited at John F. Kennedy's Inauguration
by Robert Frost

The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she will become.

For the original manuscript, please refer to the Library of Copngress:

"Dedication," Robert Frost's presidential inaugural poem, 20 January . Typescript with Frost's holograph script corrections in ink and Stewart Udall's holograph clarifications in pencil on the last page. Permission to reproduce the poem online was granted by the Estate of Robert Frost and Henry. 20....

07/17/2020

I don't believe I have seen as many fireflies in my yard and garden in the evening and late into the night since my youth. It is like a world of fairies floating and evening landing on my shoulders. Delightful reminder that nature, when given the chance, does restore her special gifts.

Fireflies in the Garden
BY ROBERT FROST

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Robert Frost, “Fireflies in the Garden” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1928, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed © 1956 by Robert Frost. Reprinted with the permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Source: The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)

04/17/2020

It is April. Late to National Poetry month. I am remiss in posting in the midst of sorrow and distancing and the randomness of a virus that we can't seem to contain... just yet. We are sheltered in in so many places, from Robert's New England across the broad swath of this land. But it is here—as if for the first time—sneaking back for moments. Poetry brings hope. More so in Spring.

As Eliot reminds us ...

"April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."
- T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

Frost has his rejoinder on the two-faced nature of this month...

"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 come over the sunlit arch,
And wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."
- Robert Frost, Two Tramps in Mud Time, 1926

12/26/2019

A poem of Christmas... and city folk, and Christmas trees. Reminds one of the Norman Rockwell painting of Main St., Stockbridge, MA. The older "local" cars parked; the "late" model red "city" car with a Christmas tree lashed to the roof.

Perhaps the guy in Frost's poem may not have gotten his thousand trees, but had to settle for just one from the "slope behind the house." On his way back to the "big" city, this Stockbridge Main Street is a leisurely drive south on Rte. 7 over the Mass. border through Pittsfield and Lenox. While the Rockwell red car is heading on "northbound" Rte. 7, he might have taken the back road past Tanglewood, past the Stockbridge Bowl, hung a left as Prospect Hill Road spills out onto Rte. 7 with plans to lunch at the Red Lion Inn on the right.

Herewith Frost's verse...

CHRISTMAS TREES

BY ROBERT FROST
(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.

(courtesy of the Poetry Foundation)

12/02/2019

Hello Frost Friends! Please consider casting your vote in The Poetry Society's World Cup. Robert''s "Stopping by the Woods..." is in the lead in what looks like a four-way race for the title! https://poetryfoundation.org/poems/42891/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening…

Whose woods these are I think I know.

11/04/2019

Perhaps we could dedicate this November Frost piece to Willa Cather. See the Summer 2013 issue of the The Hudson Review, where Cather's relationship with Frost is noted in "Epistolary Cather" by William Pritchard.

"My November Guest"

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walked the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She's glad the birds are gone away,
She's glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost

06/12/2019

https://www.bennington.edu/news-and-features/erin-mckenny-appointed-new-director-of-robert-frost-stone-house-museum?fbclid=IwAR3Ig95rXELcTsVWFgsTdKVF953U7Cfch7UOg5adG4ftvVq6kv6Vc2Td9wU

McKenny will assume the directorship beginning July 1, 2019, as current director Megan Mayhew-Bergman transitions into an advisory role at the museum.

06/12/2019

In reference to our most recent post regarding the puckish nature of Spring in the northern climes... Frost addressed it thus:

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 come over the sunlit arch, And wind comes off a frozen peak, And you're two months back in the middle of March.