He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: ‘What is it you see From up there always—for I [...]
I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain - and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. I have stood still and [...]
With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse Through a pitch-dark limitless grove. And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead. The ponderous beast went down With a [...]
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 queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. [...]
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 [...]
“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of "Paradiso" by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. But God's own descent [...]
How on earth did we stray so far from the paths of wisdom that we find ourselves in this God-forsaken place that is our modern world? I am fond of telling the story of an American tourist who gets himself hopelessly lost somewhere in the wilds of the west of Ireland. In desperation, he stops [...]
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 [...]
A century after its composition, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” continues to leave readers, academics, poetry lovers, and poets alike pondering its meaning. Undoubtedly, the poem has a magical quality: its images are simple, yet elusive; the scene of dark woods, snow-blanketed trails, and a single farmhouse are painted with clarity, [...]
Robert Frost seemed stubbornly—even querulously—conservative, but it is often the case that he dramatizes political realities most shrewdly and profoundly in poems that never mention politics in the conventional sense. Shortly before the death of Robert Frost, the editor of a selection of critical essays on the poet summarized the case for his prosecution as [...]
I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. The dew was gone that made his blade so keen Before I came to view the levelled scene. […]
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. […]
For all the poem’s structural simplicity, Robert Frost’s “Fire and Ice” perfectly encapsulates the poetic concept of complex metaphor. The metaphor, in which the universe mirrors the human soul, has two contrasting components: fire and ice, the personal and the cosmic, the real and the theoretical, desire and hate. Anyone who has ever attended a [...]
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. The Imaginative Conservative applies the [...]