Robert Frost

"I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth— Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small."

"No memory of having starred Atones for later disregard, Or keeps the end from being hard. Better to go down dignified With boughten friendship at your side Than none at all. Provide, provide!"

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it."

"Tree at my window, window tree, My sash is lowered when night comes on; But let there never be curtain drawn Between you and me."

"You see the beauty of my proposal is It needn’t wait on general revolution. I bid you to a one-man revolution— The only revolution that is coming."

"Two such as you with such a master speed Cannot be parted nor be swept away From one another once you are agreed That life is only life forevermore Together wing to wing and oar to oar."

"A dramatic necessity goes deep into the nature of the sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic."

"Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air"

"Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs. Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb, I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, Something more of the depths – and then I lost it. Water came to rebuke the too clear water. One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom, Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."

"You could not tell, and yet it looked as if The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff, The cliff in being backed by continent; It looked as if a night of dark intent Was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken."

"Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct."

"When I see young men doing so wonderfully well in athletics, I don't feel angry at them. I feel jealous of them. I wish that some of my boys in writing would do the same thing. ... You must have form — performance. The thing itself is indescribable, but it is felt like athletic form. To have form, feel form in sports — and by analogy feel form in verse. One works and waits for form in both. As I said, the person who spends his time criticizing the play around him will never write poetry. He will write criticism — for the New Republic."

"But yield who will to their separation, My object in living is to unite My avocation and my vocation As my two eyes make one in sight. Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For heaven and the future´s sakes."

"Wind goes from farm to farm in wave on wave, But carries no cry of what is hoped to be. There may be little or much beyond the grave, But the strong are saying nothing until they see."

"The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil."

"Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more businesslike than businessmen. Their wares are so much harder to get rid of."

"Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue."

"And then we saw him bolt. We heard the miniature thunder where he fled, And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and gray, Like a shadow across instead of behind the flakes."

"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."

"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."

"And be all plunderers curst. 'The best way to hate is the worst. 'Tis to find what the hated need, Never mind of what actual worth, And wipe that out of the earth. Let them die of unsatisfied greed, Of unsatisfied love of display, Of unsatisfied love of the high, Unvulgar, unsoiled, and ideal. Let their trappings be taken away. Let them suffer starvation and die Of being brought down to the real."

"Such was life in the Golden Gate: Gold dusted all we drank and ate, And I was one of the children told, 'We all must eat our peck of gold.'"

"It must be the brook Can trust itself to go by contraries The way I can with you — and you with me — Because we're — we're — I don't know What we are."

"The world has room to make a bear feel free; The universe seems cramped to you and me."

"Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."

"Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second. My mouth is sealed for the duration of my stay here. I'm not even going to write letters around to explain to collectors my not having had any Christmas card this year. I'm not going to explain anything personal any more."

"Don't join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family — But not much in between, unless a college."

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

"The land may vary more; But wherever the truth may be — The water comes ashore, And the people look at the sea."

"Never ask of money spent Where the spender thinks it went. Nobody was ever meant To remember or invent What he did with every cent."

"Now no joy but lacks salt, That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove."

"Everything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not declare itself in form, but it is drama or nothing. A least lyric alone may have a hard time, but it can make a beginning, and lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene — in character, in a setting. By whom, where and when is the question."

"If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving."

"We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?"

"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."

"The snake stood up for evil in the Garden."

"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 way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued."

"How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below. I have to be gone for a season or so."

"The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been."

"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."

"He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake."

"Let me be the one To do what is done."

"I turned to speak to God About the world's despair But to make bad matters worse I found God wasn't there. God turned to speak to me (Don't anybody laugh) God found I wasn't there At least not over half."

"Dust always blowing about the town, Except when sea-fog laid it down, And I was one of the children told Some of the blowing dust was gold."

"All the dust the wind blew high Appeared like god in the sunset sky, But I was one of the children told Some of the dust was really gold."

"One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night."

"If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes Will keep my talk from getting overwise, I'm not the one for putting off the proof. Let it be overwhelming, off a roof And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust, And blind me to a standstill if it must."

"Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun."

"That day she put our heads together, Fate had her imagination about her, Your head so much concerned with outer, Mine with inner, weather."