The Collected Poems of Robert Frost by Robert Frost

Author:Robert Frost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LANGUAGE. LINGUISTICS. LITERATURE, General, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Poetry, European, American, Literature
Publisher: Book Sales
Published: 2016-11-15T03:30:14+00:00

TO A YOUNG WRETCH

(BOETHIAN)

As gay for you to take your father's axe

As take his gun—rod—to go hunting—fishing.

You nick my spruce until its fiber cracks.

It gives up standing straight and goes down swishing.

You link an arm in its arm and you lean

Across the light snow homeward smelling green.

[ could have bought you just as good a tree

To frizzle resin in a candle flame,

And what a saving 'twould have meant to me.

But tree by charity is not the same

As tree by enterprise and expedition.

I must not spoil your Christmas with contrition.

It is your Christmases against my woods. But even where thus opposing interests kill, They are to be thought of as opposing goods Oftener than as conflicting good and ill; Which makes the war god seem no special dunce For always fighting on both sides at once.

And though in tinsel chain and popcorn rope, My tree a captive in your window bay Has lost its footing on my mountain slope And lost the stars of heaven, may, oh, may The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.

THE LESSON FOR TODAY

If this uncertain age in which we dwell Were really as dark as I hear sages tell, And I convinced that they were really sages, I should not curse myself with it to hell, But leaving not the chair I long have sat in, I should betake me back ten thousand pages To the world's undebatably dark ages, And getting up my mediaeval Latin, Seek converse common cause and brotherhood (By all that's liberal—I should, I should) With poets who could calmly take the fate Of being born at once too early and late, And for these reasons kept from being great. Yet singing but Dione in the wood And uer aspergit terramfloribus They slowly led old Latin verse to rhyme And to forget the ancient lengths of time, And so began the modern world for us.

Td say, O Master of the Palace School,

You were not Charles' nor anybody's fool:

Tell me as pedagogue to pedagogue*

You did not know that since King Charles did rule

You had no chance but to be minor, did you?

Your light was spent perhaps as in a fog

That at once kept you burning low and hid you.

The age may very well have been to blame

For your not having won to Virgil's fame.

But no one ever heard you make the claim.

You would not think you knew enough to judge

The age when full upon you. That's my point.

We have to-day and I could call their name

Who know exactly what is out of joint

To make their verse and their excuses lame.

They've tried to grasp with too much social fact

Too large a situation. You and I

Would be afraid if we should comprehend

And get outside of too much bad statistics

Our muscles never could again contract:

We never could recover human shape,

But must live lives out mentally agape,

Or die of philosophical distension.

That's how we feel—and we're no special mystics.

We can't appraise the time in which we act. But for the folly of it, let's pretend We know enough to know it for adverse.

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