Title: From Mountain Interval
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Author: Robert Frost
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PDF Version: 1.2
Page No 1
From Mountain Interval
Robert Frost
Page No 2
Table of Contents
From Mountain Interval....................................................................................................................................1
Robert Frost.............................................................................................................................................1
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN ......................................................................................................................1
AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT.......................................................................................................2
The Exposed Nest....................................................................................................................................2
A Patch of Old Snow...............................................................................................................................3
The Telephone.........................................................................................................................................3
Meeting and Passing................................................................................................................................4
Hyla Brook ...............................................................................................................................................4
The Oven Bird ..........................................................................................................................................5
Bond and Free ..........................................................................................................................................5
BIRCHES .................................................................................................................................................6
PUTTING IN THE SEED.......................................................................................................................7
A Time to Talk .........................................................................................................................................7
THE COW IN APPLETIME .................................................................................................................8
RangeFinding .........................................................................................................................................8
THE HILL WIFE ....................................................................................................................................8
'OUT, OUT'.......................................................................................................................................10
THE GUMGATHERER ......................................................................................................................11
The LineGang......................................................................................................................................12
The Vanishing Red................................................................................................................................12
From Mountain Interval
i
Page No 3
From Mountain Interval
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
An Old Man's Winter Night
The Exposed Nest
A Patch of Old Snow
The Telephone
Meeting and Passing
Hyla Brook
The Oven Bird
Bond and Free
Birches
Putting In The Seed
A Time to Talk
The Cow In AppleTime
RangeFinding
The Hill Wife
'Out, Out'
The GumGatherer
The LineGang
The Vanishing Red
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
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
From Mountain Interval 1
Page No 4
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So latearising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man one man can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.
The Exposed Nest
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
I the meadow, busy with the newcut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But 'twas no makebelieve with you today,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steelbright Junegrass, and blackening heads of clovers.
'Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
From Mountain Interval
AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT 2
Page No 5
The cutterbar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasking flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at oncecould means be found.
The way the nestfull every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a motherbird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the motherbird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might out meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven't any memoryhave you?
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.
A Patch of Old Snow
There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blowaway paper the rain
Had brought to rest.
It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten
If I ever read it.
The Telephone
'When I was just as far as I could walk
From here today,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head again a flower
I heard you talk.
From Mountain Interval
A Patch of Old Snow 3
Page No 6
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say
You spoke from that flower on the window sill
Do you remember what it was you said?'
'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'
'Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned on my head
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say
Someone said "Come" I heard it as I bowed.'
'I may have thought as much, but not aloud.'
"Well, so I came.'
Meeting and Passing
As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less that two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.
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 sleighbells in a ghost of snow)
Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,
From Mountain Interval
Meeting and Passing 4
Page No 7
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.
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a midsummer and a midwood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Midsummer is to spring as one to ten.
he says the early petalfall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Bond and Free
Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings.
On snow and sand and turn, I see
Where Love has left a printed trace
With straining in the world's embrace.
And such is Love and glad to be
But Thought has shaken his ankles free.
Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom
And sits in Sirius' disc all night,
Till day makes him retrace his flight
With smell of burning on every plume,
From Mountain Interval
The Oven Bird 5
Page No 8
Back past the sun to an earthly room.
His gains in heaven are what they are.
Yet some say Love by being thrall
And simply staying possesses all
In several beauty that Thought fares far
To find fused in another star.
BIRCHES
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.
Icestorms 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 manycoloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snowcrust
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 matteroffact about the icestorm,
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,
From Mountain Interval
BIRCHES 6
Page No 9
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 wilfully 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 snowwhite 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.
PUTTING IN THE SEED
You come to fetch me from my work tonight
When supper's on the table, and we'll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea);
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a Springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, 'What is it?'
No, not as there is a time talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
From Mountain Interval
PUTTING IN THE SEED 7
Page No 10
Bladeend up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
THE COW IN APPLETIME
Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wallbuilders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and wormeaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.
RangeFinding
The battle rent a cobweb diamondstrung
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.
THE HILL WIFE
LONELINESS
(Her Word)
One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say goodbye;
Or care so much when they come back
From Mountain Interval
THE COW IN APPLETIME 8
Page No 11
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing
As we are too sad for the other here
With birds that fill their breasts
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.
HOUSE FEAR
Always I tell you this they learned
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out to the indoor night,
They. learned to leave the housedoor wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.
THE SMILE
(Her Word)
I didn't like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled did you see him? I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he's got.
He's watching from the woods as like as not.
THE OFTREPEATED DREAM
She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the windowlatch
Of the room where they slept.
The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!
It never had been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oftrepeated dream
Of what the tree might do.
THE IMPULSE
It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,
And work was little in the house,
From Mountain Interval
THE COW IN APPLETIME 9
Page No 12
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.
She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.
And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard.
When he called her
And didn't answer didn't speak
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.
He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother's house
Was she there.
Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.
'OUT, OUT'
The buzzsaw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stovelength sticks of wood,
Sweetscented 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
From Mountain Interval
'OUT, OUT' 10
Page No 13
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.
THE GUMGATHERER
There overtook me and drew me in
To his downhill, earlymorning stride,
And set me five miles on my road
Better than if he had had me ride,
A man with a swinging bag for'load
And half the bag wound round his hand.
We talked like barking above the din
Of water we walked along beside.
And for my telling him where I'd been
And where I lived in mountain land
To be coming home the way I was,
He told me a little about himself.
He came from higher up in the pass
Where the grist of the newbeginning brooks
Is blocks split off the mountain mass
And hop. eless grist enough it looks
Ever to grind to soil for grass.
(The way it is will do for moss.)
There he had built his stolen shack.
It had to be a stolen shack
Because of the fears of fire and logs
That trouble the sleep of lumber folk:
Visions of half the world burned black
And the sun shrunken yellow in smoke.
We know who when they come to town
Bring berries under the wagon seat,
Or a basket of eggs between their feet;
What this man brought in a cotton sack
Was gum, the gum of the mountain spruce.
He showed me lumps of the scented stuff
Like uncut jewels, dull and rough
It comes to market golden brown;
But turns to pink between the teeth.
I told him this is a pleasant life
To set your breast to the bark of trees
That all your days are dim beneath,
And reaching up with a little knife,
To loose the resin and take it down
From Mountain Interval
THE GUMGATHERER 11
Page No 14
And bring it to market when you please.
The LineGang
Here come the linegang pioneering by,
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead
They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought
But in no hush they string it: they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taught,
To hold it hard until they make it fast,
To ease awaythey have it. With a laugh,
An oath of towns that set the wild at naught
They bring the telephone and telegraph.
The Vanishing Red
He is said to have been the last Red man
In Action. And the Miller is said to have laughed
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher's license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
'Whose business,if I take it on myself,
Whose businessbut why talk round the barn?
When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.'
You can't get back and see it as he saw it.
It's too long a story to go into now.
You'd have to have been there and lived it.
They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.
'Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheelpint?'
He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
The he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
From Mountain Interval
The LineGang 12
Page No 15
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came upstairs aloneand gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a mealsack
That the man with the mealsack didn't catchthen.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheelpit all right.
From Mountain Interval
The LineGang 13
Bookmarks
1. Table of Contents, page = 3
2. From Mountain Interval, page = 4
3. Robert Frost, page = 4
4. THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, page = 4
5. AN OLD MAN'S WINTER NIGHT, page = 5
6. The Exposed Nest, page = 5
7. A Patch of Old Snow, page = 6
8. The Telephone, page = 6
9. Meeting and Passing, page = 7
10. Hyla Brook, page = 7
11. The Oven Bird, page = 8
12. Bond and Free, page = 8
13. BIRCHES, page = 9
14. PUTTING IN THE SEED, page = 10
15. A Time to Talk, page = 10
16. THE COW IN APPLE-TIME, page = 11
17. Range-Finding, page = 11
18. THE HILL WIFE , page = 11
19. 'OUT, OUT--', page = 13
20. THE GUM-GATHERER, page = 14
21. The Line-Gang, page = 15
22. The Vanishing Red, page = 15