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‘All song of the woods is crushed’

From the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift, 
  The road is forlorn all day, 
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift, 
  And the hoof-prints vanish away. 
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain. 
Come over the hills and far with me, 
  And be my love in the rain. 

The birds have less to say for themselves 
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves, 
  Although they are no less there: 
All song of the woods is crushed like some 
  Wild, easily shattered rose. 
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows. 

There is the gale to urge behind 
  And bruit our singing down, 
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind 
  From which to gather your gown.    
What matter if we go clear to the west, 
  And come not through dry-shod? 
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast 
  The rain-fresh goldenrod. 

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells   
  But it seems like the sea’s return 
To the ancient lands where it left the shells 
  Before the age of the fern; 
And it seems like the time when after doubt 
  Our love came back amain.      
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout 
  And be my love in the rain.

“A Line-Storm Song,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963). A “line storm” was a term once very common in New England that usually referred to a coastal storm (sometimes of tropical origin) coming up the coast in September or early October. People called them line storms because they came around the time that the sun “crossed the line,” that is, the fall equinox.

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‘Design of darkness’

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.

‘‘Design,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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‘And you’re two months back’

Western face of Camel's Hump Mountain (elevation 4,079 feet), in Vermont.

— Photo by Niranjan Arminius

“….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….’’

— From “Two Tramps in Mud Time,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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'Can't fill a house'

“Winter night,’’ by Bror Lindh (1877-1941), Swedish artist

“An Old Man’s Winter Night,’’ by Robert Frost (1974-1963)

ll 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 late-arising,—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 fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

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‘The love of bare November Days’

—Photo by Łukasz Smolarczyk

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 walks 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 grey
     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.

“My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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‘Into the dark decayed’

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is way in ours.

“In Hardwood Groves,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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‘For what they are’

— Photo J. Pinta (Redline2200)

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 sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
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.

— “Hyla Brook,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963). Hyla Brook is near the farm in Derry, N.H., where Frost lived with his family in 1900-1911, before he became famous.

J. Pinta (Redline2200) -

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‘From the furnace of a star’

Saint Joseph's Abbey, in Spencer Mass., a Trappist monastery.

— Photo by John Phelan

“The monastery is quiet.  Seconal

drifts down upon it from the moon.

I can see the lights

of the city I came from,

can remember how a boy sets out

like something thrown from the furnace

of a star…. ‘‘

— From “The Monk’s Insomnia,’’ by Denis Johnson (1949-2017), an American poet. This came from the book Mountain Interval: Poems from the Frost Place, 1977-1986. The Frost Place, in Franconia, N.H., is a museum and poetry center dedicated to Robert Frost, who lived there with his family full time from 1915 to 1920, as he was becoming famous, and then summered there until 1940.

— Photo by Mfwills

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‘Like profanation’

— Photo by Christoph Geisler

I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o’clock of a winter eve.

— “Good Hours,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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‘Bare November days’

— Photo by E.mil.mil

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 walks 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 grey
     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.

“My November Guest,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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‘Metaphor for devastation’

Frost at his 85th birthday party, in 1959.

“While he {Robert Frost) was talking he was looking out,

But stayed in, sagacity better indoors.

He became a metaphor for inner devastation,

Too scared to accept my invitation.’’

— From “Worldly Failure,’’ by Richard Eberhart (1904-2005), an American poet. He knew Frost (1874-1963), a giant of English language poetry.

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Toughing it out

New England’s most famous poet, Robert Frost (1874-1963), was a brilliant ironist. He spent the largest part of his life in New Hampshire and Vermont.

“One reason a lot of us live here is probably that surviving and flourishing in this climate is such a good, moral thing to do. It’s decadent to be warm all the time.’’

xxx

“What New England is, is a state of mind, a place where dry humor and perpetual disappointment blend to produce an ironic pessimism that folks from away find most perplexing.’’


— Willem Lange (born 1935), an East Montpelier, Vt.-based writer and former building contractor. His weekly column, “A Yankee Notebook”, appears in several New England newspapers.

East Montpelier, Vt., town offices

— Photo by Magicpiano

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The end of his quarrel and road

Robert Frost’s grave, in Bennington, Vt.

— Photo by Nheyob 

One of the most famous — and misunderstood — poems in the English Language, first published in 1915

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—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

— “The Road Not Taken,’’ by Robert Frost


In The Paris Review  critic, poet and essayist David Orr described some of the misunderstanding this way:

“The poem’s speaker tells us he ‘shall be telling,’ at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled…yet he has already admitted that the two paths ‘equally lay / In leaves’ and ‘the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.’ So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.’’

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'The strangeness from my sight'

Red_delicious_apples.jpeg

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't 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.

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 it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

— “After Apple Picking,’’ by Robert Frost

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Early Boston art

A silver porringer created by Boston silversmith John Coney, c. 1710

A silver porringer created by Boston silversmith John Coney, c. 1710

“Some want to rob the Puritans of art….There were ten silversmiths in Boston before there was a single lawyer. People forget all those things.’’

— Robert Frost in his commencement address “What Became of New England’’ at Oberlin College in 1937.

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Frost in Bennington

“Apple Tree & Grindstone” (1923, wood engraving), by J.J. Lankes (1884-1960), in the Bennington (Vt.) Museum’s show “At Present in Vermont,’’ opening in April.(Courtesy Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.)The museum says:A cen…

Apple Tree & Grindstone(1923, wood engraving), by J.J. Lankes (1884-1960), in the Bennington (Vt.) Museum’s show “At Present in Vermont,’’ opening in April.

(Courtesy Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College.)

The museum says:

A century ago “Robert Frost arrived in Bennington County, where he lived from 1920 to 1938. Coming in April to Bennington Museum, a new major exhibit… explores Frost’s life and work as an artist and farmer and celebrates the New England legacy of America’s most beloved poet.’’

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'Make the day seem less brief'

1920px-Maple_Trees_by_Creek.jpg

O hushed October morning mild,

Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;

Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,

Should waste them all.

The crows above the forest call;

Tomorrow they may form and go.

O hushed October morning mild,

Begin the hours of this day slow.

Make the day seem to us less brief.

Hearts not averse to being beguiled,

Beguile us in the way you know.

Release one leaf at break of day;

At noon release another leaf;

One from our trees, one far away.

Retard the sun with gentle mist;

Enchant the land with amethyst.

Slow, slow!

For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,

Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,

Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—

For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

— “October,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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'At a loss' on a winter's night

— Photo of frost patterns by Schnobby

— Photo of frost patterns by Schnobby

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 late-arising, 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.

“An Old Man’s Winter Night,’’ by Robert Frost (1874-1963), New England’s and probably America’s most famous poet. He lived in rural New Hampshire and Vermont for most of his life.

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But the mountains aren't high enough

In New Hampshire’s Franconia Range

In New Hampshire’s Franconia Range

I met a lady from the South who said

(You won't believe she said it, but she said it):

"None of my family ever worked, or had

A thing to sell.
" I don't suppose the work

Much matters.
 You may work for all of me.

I've seen the time I've had to work myself.

The having anything to sell is what

Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveler from Arkansas

Who boasted of his state as beautiful

For diamonds and apples.
 "Diamonds

And apples in commercial quantities?"

I asked him, on my guard.
 "Oh, yes," he answered,

Off his.
 The time was evening in the Pullman.

I see the porter's made your bed," I told him.
 

I met a Californian who would

Talk California—a state so blessed,

He said, in climate, none bad ever died there

A natural death, and Vigilance Committees

Had had to organize to stock the graveyards

And vindicate the state's humanity.

"Just the way Stefansson runs on," I murmured,

"About the British Arctic.
 That's what comes

Of being in the market with a climate.’’
 

I met a poet from another state,

A zealot full of fluid inspiration,

Who in the name of fluid inspiration,

But in the best style of bad salesmanship,

Angrily tried to male me write a protest

(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.

He didn't even offer me a drink

Until I asked for one to steady him.

This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.
 

The only person really soiled with trade

I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire

Was someone who had just come back ashamed

From selling things in California.

He'd built a noble mansard roof with balls

On turrets, like Constantinople, deep

In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,

As if to put forever out of mind

The hope of being, as we say, received.

I found him standing at the close of day

Inside the threshold of his open barn,

Like a lone actor on a gloomy stage—

And recognized him, through the iron gray

In which his face was muffled to the eyes,

As an old boyhood friend, and once indeed

A drover with me on the road to Brighton.

His farm was "grounds," and not a farm at all;

His house among the local sheds and shanties

Rose like a factor's at a trading station.

And be was rich, and I was still a rascal.

I couldn't keep from asking impolitely,

Where bad he been and what had he been doing?

How did he get so? (Rich was understood.)

In dealing in "old rags" in San Francisco.

Oh, it was terrible as well could be.

We both of us turned over in our graves.

Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,

One each of everything as in a showcase,

Which naturally she doesn't care to sell. 

She had one President.
 (Pronounce him Purse,

And make the most of it for better or worse.

He's your one chance to score against the state.

She had one Daniel Webster.
 He was all

The Daniel Webster ever was or shall be.

She had the Dartmouth needed to produce him.

 

I call her old.
 She has one family

Whose claim is good to being settled here

Before the era of colonization,

And before that of exploration even.

John Smith remarked them as be coasted by,

Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf

At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself

They weren't Red Indians but veritable

Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,

Like those who furnished Adam's sons with wives;

However uninnocent they may have been

In being there so early in our history.

They'd been there then a hundred years or more.

Pity he didn't ask what they were up to

At that date with a wharf already built,

And take their name.
 They've since told me their name—

Today an honored one in Nottingham.

As for what they were up to more than fishing—

Suppose they weren't behaving Puritanly,

The hour bad not yet struck for being good,

Mankind had not yet gone on the Sabbatical.

It became an explorer of the deep

Not to explore too deep in others' business.
 

Did you but know of him, New Hampshire has

One real reformer who would change the world

So it would be accepted by two classes,

Artists the minute they set up as artists,

Before, that is, they are themselves accepted,

And boys the minute they get out of college.

I can't help thinking those are tests to go by. 

And she has one I don't know what to call him,

Who comes from Philadelphia every year

With a great flock of chickens of rare breeds

He wants to give the educational

Advantages of growing almost wild

Under the watchful eye of hawk and eagle

Dorkings because they're spoken of by Chaucer,

Sussex because they're spoken of by Herrick

She has a touch of gold.
 New Hampshire gold—

You may have heard of it.
 I had a farm

Offered me not long since up Berlin way

With a mine on it that was worked for gold;

But not gold in commercial quantities,

Just enough gold to make the engagement rings

And marriage rings of those who owned the farm.

What gold more innocent could one have asked for?

One of my children ranging after rocks

Lately brought home from Andover or Canaan

A specimen of beryl with a trace

Of radium.
 I know with radium

The trace would have to be the merest trace

To be below the threshold of commercial;

But trust New Hampshire not to have enough

Of radium or anything to sell.
 

A specimen of everything, I said.

She has one witch—old style.
 She lives in Colebrook.

(The only other witch I ever met

Was lately at a cut-glass dinner in Boston.

There were four candles and four people present.

The witch was young, and beautiful (new style),

And open-minded.
 She was free to question

Her gift for reading letters locked in boxes.

Why was it so much greater when the boxes

Were metal than it was when they were wooden?

It made the world seem so mysterious.

The S'ciety for Psychical Research

Was cognizant.
 Her husband was worth millions.

I think he owned some shares in Harvard College.

New Hampshire used to have at Salem

A company we called the White Corpuscles,

Whose duty was at any hour of night

To rush in sheets and fool's caps where they smelled

A thing the least bit doubtfully perscented

And give someone the Skipper Ireson's Ride.
 

One each of everything as in a showcase.
 

More than enough land for a specimen

You'll say she has, but there there enters in

Something else to protect her from herself

There quality makes up for quantity.

Not even New Hampshire farms are much for sale.

The farm I made my home on in the mountains

1 had to take by force rather than buy.

 

I caught the owner outdoors by himself

Raking.
up after winter, and I said,

“I’m going to put you off this farm: I want it.’’

“Where are you going to put me? In the road?”

“I’m going to put you on the farm next to it.’’

“Why won't the farm next to it do for you?"

"I like this better.’’
It was really better.

 

Apples? New Hampshire has them, but unsprayed,

With no suspicion in stern end or blossom end

Of vitriol or arsenate of lead,

And so not good for anything but cider.

Her unpruned grapes are flung like lariats

Far up the birches out of reach of man.

A state producing precious metals, stones,

And—writing; none of these except perhaps

The precious literature in quantity

Or quality to worry the producer

About disposing of it.
 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.

She's one of the two best states in the Union.

Vermont's the other.
 And the two have been

Yokefellows in the sap yoke from of old

In many Marches.
 And they lie like wedges,

Thick end to thin end and thin end to thick end,

And are a figure of the way the strong

Of mind and strong of arm should fit together,

One thick where one is thin and vice versa.

New Hampshire raises the Connecticut

In a trout hatchery near Canada,

But soon divides the river with Vermont.

Both are delightful states for their absurdly

Small towns—Lost Nation, Bungey, Muddy Boo,

Poplin, Still Corners (so called not because

The place is silent all day long, nor yet

Because it boasts a whisky still—because

It set out once to be a city and still

Is only corners, crossroads in a wood).

And I remember one whose name appeared

Between the pictures on a movie screen

Election night once in Franconia,

When everything had gone Republican

And Democrats were sore in need of comfort:

Easton goes Democratic, Wilson 4

Hughes 2.
 And everybody to the saddest

Laughed the loud laugh the big laugh at the little.

New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,

Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs

At Littleton (four thousand), Littleton

Laughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and

Franconia laughs, I fear—-did laugh that night­--

At Easton.
 What has Easton left to laugh at,

And like the actress exclaim "Oh, my God" at?

There's Bungey; and for Bungey there are towns,

Whole townships named but without population.
 

Anything I can say about New Hampshire

Will serve almost as well about Vermont,

Excepting that they differ in their mountains.

The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight;

New Hampshire mountains Curl up in a coil.

I had been coming to New Hampshire mountains.

And here I am and what am I to say?

Here first my theme becomes embarrassing.

Emerson said, "The God who made New Hampshire

Taunted the lofty land with little men.
"

Another Massachusetts poet said,

"I go no more to summer in New Hampshire.

I've given up my summer place in Dublin.’’
"

But when I asked to know what ailed New Hampshire,

She said she couldn't stand the people in it,

The little men (it's Massachusetts speaking).
 

And when I asked to know what ailed the people,

She said, "Go read your own books and find out.’’
"

I may as well confess myself the author

Of several books against the world in general.

To take them as against a special state

Or even nation's to restrict my meaning.

I'm what is called a sensibilitist,

Or otherwise an environmentalist.

I refuse to adapt myself a mite

To any change from hot to cold, from wet

To dry, from poor to rich, or back again.

I make a virtue of my suffering

From nearly everything that goes on round me.

In other words, I know wherever I am,

Being the creature of literature I am,

1 sball not lack for pain to keep me awake.

Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:

"Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.’’

Samoa, Russia, Ireland I complain of,

No less than England, France, and Italy.
 

Because I wrote my novels in New Hampshire

Is no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire.

When I left Massachusetts years ago

Between two days, the reason why I sought

New Hampshire, not Connecticut,

Rhode Island, New York, or Vermont was this:

Where I was living then, New Hampshire offered

The nearest boundary to escape across.

I hadn't an illusion in my handbag

About the people being better there

Than those I left behind.
 I thought they weren't.

 I thought they couldn't be.
 And yet they were.

I'd sure had no such friends in Massachusetts

As Hall of Windham, Gay of Atkinson,

Bartlett of Raymond (now of Colorado),

Harris of Derry, and Lynch of Bethlehem.

The glorious bards of Massachusetts seem

To want to make New Hampshire people over.

They taunt the lofty land with little men.

I don't know what to say about the people.

For art's sake one could almost wish them worse

Rather than better.
 How are we to write

The Russian novel in America

As long as life goes so unterribly?

There is the pinch from which our only outcry

In literature to date is heard to come.

We get what little misery we can

Out of not having cause for misery.

It makes the guild of novel writers sick

To be expected to be Dostoievskis

On nothing worse than too much luck and comfort.

This is not sorrow, though; it's just the vapors,

And recognized as such in Russia itself

Under the new regime, and so forbidden.

If well it is with Russia, then feel free

To say so or be stood against the wall

And shot.
 It's Pollyanna now or death.

This, then, is the new freedom we hear tell of;

And very sensible.
 No state can build

A literature that shall at once be sound

And sad on a foundation of well-being.
 

To show the level of intelligence

Among us: it was just a Warren farmer

Whose horse had pulled him short up in the road

By me, a stranger.
 This is what he said,

From nothing but embarrassment and want

Of anything more sociable to say:

"You hear those bound dogs sing on Moosilauke?

Well, they remind me of the hue and cry

We've heard against the Mid -Victorians

And never rightly understood till Bryan

Retired from politics and joined the chorus.

The matter with the Mid-Victorians

Seems to have been a man named John L.
 Darwin.

"Go 'long," I said to him, he to his horse.

I knew a man who failing as a farmer

Burned down his farmhouse for the fire insurance,

And spent the proceeds on a telescope

To satisfy a lifelong curiosity

About our place among the infinities.

And how was that for otherworldliness? 

If I must choose which I would elevate —

The people or the already lofty mountains

I'd elevate the already lofty mountains

The only fault I find with old New Hampshire

Is that her mountains aren't quite high enough.

I was not always so; I've come to be so.

How, to my sorrow, how have I attained

A height from which to look down critical

On mountains? What has given me assurance

 To say what height becomes New Hampshire mountains,

Or any mountains? Can it be some strength

I feel, as of an earthquake in my back,

To heave them higher to the morning star?

Can it be foreign travel in the Alps?

Or having seen and credited a moment

The solid molding of vast peaks of cloud

Behind the pitiful reality

Of Lincoln, Lafayette, and Liberty?

Or some such sense as says bow high shall jet

The fountain in proportion to the basin?

No, none of these has raised me to my throne

Of intellectual dissatisfaction,

But the sad accident of having seen

Our actual mountains given in a map

Of early times as twice the height they are—

Ten thousand feet instead of only five—

Which shows how sad an accident may be.

Five thousand is no longer high enough.

Whereas I never had a good idea

About improving people in the world,

Here I am overfertile in suggestion,

And cannot rest from planning day or night

How high I'd thrust the peaks in summer snow

To tap the upper sky and draw a flow

Of frosty night air on the vale below

Down from the stars to freeze the dew as starry.

The more the sensibilitist I am

The more I seem to want my mountains wild;

The way the wiry gang-boss liked the logjam.
 

After he'd picked the lock and got it started,

He dodged a log that lifted like an arm

Against the sky to break his back for him,

Then came in dancing, skipping with his life

Across the roar and chaos, and the words

We saw him say along the zigzag journey

Were doubtless as the words we heard him say

On coming nearer: "Wasn't she an i-deal

Son-of-a-bitch? You bet she was an i-deal.’’

For all her mountains fall a little short,

Her people not quite short enough for Art,

She's still New Hampshire; a most restful state.

Lately in converse with a New York alec

About the new school of the pseudo-phallic,

I found myself in a close corner where

I bad to make an almost funny choice.

"Choose you which you will be—a prude, or puke,

Mewling and puking in the public arms.’’

"Me for the hills where I don’t have to choose.’’

"But if you bad to choose, which would you be?"

1 wouldn't be a prude afraid of nature.

I know a man who took a double ax

And went alone against a grove of trees;

But his heart failing him, he dropped the ax

And ran for shelter quoting Matthew Arnold:

"'Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood':

There s been enough shed without shedding mine.

Remember Birnam Wood! The wood's in flux!"

He had a special terror of the flux

That showed itself in dendrophobia.

The only decent tree had been to mill

And educated into boards, be said.

He knew too well for any earthly use

The line where man leaves off and nature starts.

And never overstepped it save in dreams.

He stood on the safe side of the line talking—

Which is sheer Matthew Arnoldism,

The cult of one who owned himself "a foiled

Circuitous wanderer," and "took dejectedly

His seat upon the intellectual throne"—

Agreed in 'frowning on these improvised

Altars the woods are full of nowadays,

Again as in the days when Ahaz sinned

By worship under green trees in the open.

Scarcely a mile but that I come on one,

A black-checked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal.

Even to say the groves were God's first temples

Comes too near to Ahaz' sin for safety.

Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred.

But here is not a question of what's sacred;

Rather of what to face or run away from.

I'd hate to be a runaway from nature.

And neither would I choose to be a puke

Who cares not what be does in company,

And when he can't do anything, falls back

On words, and tries his worst to make words speak

Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.

It seems a narrow choice the age insists on

8ow about being a good Greek, for instance)

That course, they tell me, isn't offered this year.

"Come, but this isn't choosing—puke or prude?"

Well, if I have to choose one or the other,

I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer

With an income in cash of, say, a thousand

(From, say, a publisher in New York City).
 

It's restful to arrive at a decision,

And restful just to think about New Hampshire.

At present I am living in Vermont.

— “New Hampshire,’’ by Robert Frost 

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Animals in Middlebury

“The Messenger,’’ by Dana Simson, in her show “the animals are innocent,’’ at the Henry Sheldon Museum, Middlebury, Vt., through Jan. 11.  The museum says that the exhibit features the mixed-media work of artist, ceramist, author and illustrator Sim…

The Messenger,’’ by Dana Simson, in her show “the animals are innocent,’’ at the Henry Sheldon Museum, Middlebury, Vt., through Jan. 11.

The museum says that the exhibit features the mixed-media work of artist, ceramist, author and illustrator Simson. “Her ceramic boat sculptures with their animal passengers, along with her paintings of animals, appear whimsical and charming at first glance. However, there's a more serious side to the works, as they're meant to represent the potential effects of climate change on animals.’’

Middlebury is best known as the home of Middlebury College and, especially for the college’s Bread Loaf School of English, a graduate school associated with many celebrated writers, but especially the great poet Robert Frost, who lived part of the year in nearby Ripton, Vt. , in a homestead now owned by MIddlebury College. The area also has many beautiful and highly productive farms. The Green Mountains rise to the east of Middlebury.

Middlebury College, which is considered elite

Middlebury College, which is considered elite

Downtown Middlebury

Downtown Middlebury

Lithograph of Middlebury from 1886 by L.R. Burleigh with list of landmarks

Lithograph of Middlebury from 1886 by L.R. Burleigh with list of landmarks

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