Frost Robert - The road not taken: a selection of Robert Frosts poems

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A Collection of Poems. Robert Frost.

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About the author

Robert Lee Frost (March
26, 1874January 29, 1963)
was, in the estimation of many
Americans, the greatest
American poet of the 20th

century, and one of the
greatest poets writing in
English of the 20th century.
Frost received 4 Pulitzer
Prizes.

Frost, although most associated with New England, was born in San Francisco and lived in California until he was 11. Frost grew up as a city boy and published his first poem in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He attended Dartmouth College and Harvard University but did not complete a degree. Eventually, after purchasing a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, he became known for his wry voice that was both rural and personal.

In 1912 he sold his farm and moved to England to become a full-time poet. His first book of poetry, A Boys Will , was published the next year. He returned to America in 1915, bought a farm in Franconia, New Hampshire and launched a career of writing, teaching and lecturing.

He recited his work, The Gift Outright, at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and represented the United States on several official missions.

He also became known for poems that include an interplay of voices, such as Death of the Hired Man. American schoolchildren often memorize his poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Other highly acclaimed poems include Mending Wall, Birches, After Apple Picking, The Pasture, Fire and Ice, The Road Not Taken, and Directive.

On his passing in 1963, Robert Frost was buried in the Old Bennington Cemetery, in Bennington, Vermont.
During his life, the Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville, Maryland was named after him.

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Contents

Click on a poem to go to the first line of that poem.

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The Poetry of Robert Frost.

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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 boys hand, or seemed to leap He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boys 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

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Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a mans work, though a child at heart He saw all spoiled. Dont let him cut my hand off The doctor, when he comes. Dont 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 thenthe watcher at his pulse took fright. No one believed. They listened at his heart. Littlelessnothing!and that ended it. No more to build on there. And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

A Girls Garden

A neighbor of mine in the village

Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself, And he said, Why not?

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood, And he said, Just it.

And he said, That ought to make you An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength On your slim-jim arm.

It was not enough of a garden Her father said, to plow;
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So she had to work it all by hand, But she dont mind now.
A great deal of none.

She wheeled the dung in a wheelbarrow Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left Her not-nice load,
Now when she sees in the village How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right, She says, I know!

And hid from anyone passing. And then she begged the seed. She says she thinks she planted one Of all things but weed.
Its as when I was a farmer... Oh never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale To the same person twice.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn, And even fruit trees.

And yes, she has long mistrusted That a cider-apple
In bearing there today is hers, Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany When all was said and done, A little bit of everything,

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladders sticking through a tree Toward heaven still,
And theres a barrel that I didnt fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didnt 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.

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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 its like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right