Robert Frost

[Raphael]

Anyone familiar with this poet's works?

[Saturn]

If by familiar, do you have I read some of it, yes, I am, he was a very fine poet indeed.

[Malia]

I've read a few of his poems, but I have never deeply delved into Frost's works. Are you just discovering him, Raphael? Any insights? Favorite poems?

[Raphael]

If by familiar, do you have I read some of it, yes, I am, he was a very fine poet indeed.

I've read a few of his poems, but I have never deeply delved into Frost's works. Are you just discovering him, Raphael? Any insights? Favorite poems?

Yes, to both of you- I meant had anyone read any. I was getting logged out of the library so couldn't elaborate! I'm at home using the dongle again. I have read the one about the road less travelled- I like that. I aim to read some more tho.

[Saturn]

Some of my favourite lines and passages from Frost:

“Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?”
from ‘Reluctance’

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”
from 'The Death Of The Hired Man’

“No, from the time when one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretence of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.”
from ‘Home Burial’

“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 travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
from ‘The Road Not Taken’

“So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.”
from ‘Birches’.

“See how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.
Some say existence like a Pirouot
And Pirouette, forever in one place,
Stands still and dances, but it runs away;
It seriously, sadly, runs away
To fill the abyss’s void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook,
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.
It flows between us, over us, and with us.
And it is time, strength, tone, light, life, and love –
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death
That spends to nothingness – and unresisted,
Save by some strange resistance in itself,
Not just a swerving, but a throwing back,
As if regret were in it and were sacred.
It has this throwing backward on itself
So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
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.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from..
It is most us.”
from ‘West-running brook’

On being chosen poet of Vermont

Breathes there a bard who isn’t moved
When he finds his verse is understood
And not entirely disapproved
By his country and his neighborhood?

[Raphael]

Some of my favourite lines and passages from Frost:

“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 travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
from ‘The Road Not Taken’

These lines are very good- they have stuck in my mind since about 2002.

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.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from..
It is most us.”
from ‘West-running brook’

That is very good- almost Keatsian- I think our Junkets would have liked Robert Frost.

[Malia]

I like how Frost says that he took the road less traveled by and "that has made all the difference". He doesn't say if that difference was positive or negative--or both! I like that openness. . .gets a person in a right meditative mood.

[Raphael]

I like how Frost says that he took the road less traveled by and "that has made all the difference". He doesn't say if that difference was positive or negative--or both! I like that openness. . .gets a person in a right meditative mood.

Yes indeed- and it might mean that it was both positive and negative at the same time...

[Malia]

I like how Frost says that he took the road less traveled by and "that has made all the difference". He doesn't say if that difference was positive or negative--or both! I like that openness. . .gets a person in a right meditative mood.

Yes indeed- and it might mean that it was both positive and negative at the same time...

Like life, itself, eh? What did Shakespeare say? "Life is like a mingled yarn, good and ill together".

[Raphael]

Yes- I had a little shopping trip today- good- then the toilet broke- bad.

[Cybele]

I am indeed familiar with Frost.
I think the thing I love best about his work is how accessible it is. (Even those who are not poetry nerds like I am love his work.) His poetry also has a lot of depth -- and this is something those who only view him as a (self-styled) Yankee Sage often fail to see.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" <sigh> still gives me chills.
And -- I made an Australian friend (she's a big Frost fan) jealous with this tidbit: Frost once had dinner in the house across the street from us. (Sorry, folks. I just couldn't resist bragging about that. )

[Raphael]

[BrokenLyre]

That's cool, Cybele, about Robert Frost having dinner across the street from you.

But George Washington once stayed in a house in my little town (Cohoes, NY) just a short distance from my home.

Not bragging. Just interesting I think.

[Cybele]

That's cool, Cybele, about Robert Frost having dinner across the street from you.

But George Washington once stayed in a house in my little town (Cohoes, NY) just a short distance from my home.

Not bragging. Just interesting I think.

Ahhh. Poets are more common than Founding Fathers out here in the Ohio wilderness than back east!

[steffen]

Cybele; The fact that you mention you're from Ohio might explain your use of the profile portrait of Keats as your icon. It's a detail taken from Haydon's famous painting, "Christ´s Entry Into Jerusalem" which hangs in the atrium of the chapel of Mt. St. Mary's Seminary (Atheneum of Ohio) in Cincinnati, Ohio. However did it get there?

Back to Robert Frost, I especially like Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Nothing Gold Can Stay. Frost said of Stopping by Woods that it contained everything he knew and that he had never written anything better. It's the only poem that I have taken the trouble to memorize and it never tires. It was written in 1912. It's last stanza is a fascinating example of the death-wish motif. I consider the first line of this stanza, in all of its naked simplicity, to be as good a definition of beauty as can be found --lovely, dark, deep--

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

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.

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.

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.