I met a lady from the South who said (You won’t believe she said it, but she… ‘None of my family ever worked, or had A thing to sell.’ I don’t suppose the w… Much matters. You may work for all of m…
For Lincoln MacVeagh Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softl… Has been picked up with stones to build… Some laborer found one faded and stone-c…
I came an errand one cloud-blowing eveni… To a slab-built, black-paper-covered hou… Of one room and one window and one door, The only dwelling in a waste cut over A hundred square miles round it in the m…
`You know Orion always comes up sideway… Throwing a leg up over our fence of moun… And rising on his hands, he looks in on… Busy outdoors by lantern—light with some… I should have done by daylight, and inde…
Her teacher’s certainty it must be Mabe… Made Maple first take notice of her nam… She asked her father and he told her, '… Maple is right.’ ‘But teacher told the school
I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my ha… From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch…
Having a wheel and four legs of its own Has never availed the cumbersome grindst… To get it anywhere that I can see. These hands have helped it go, and even… Not all the motion, though, they ever le…
To drive Paul out of any lumber camp All that was needed was to say to him, ‘How is the wife, Paul?’- and he’d disa… Some said it was because be bad no wife, And hated to be twitted on the subject;
What tree may not the fig be gathered fr… The grape may not be gathered from the b… It’s all you know the grape, or know the… As a girl gathered from the birch myself Equally with my weight in grapes, one au…
Nothing to say to all those marriages! She had made three herself to three of h… The score was even for them, three to th… But come to die she found she cared so m… She thought of children in a burial row;
I staid the night for shelter at a farm Behind the mountain, with a mother and s… Two old-believers. They did all the tal… Mother. Folks think a witch who has fam… She could call up to pass a winter eveni…
I stay; But it isn’t as if There wasn’t always Hudson’s Bay And the fur trade, A small skiff
Old Davis owned a solid mica mountain In Dalton that would someday make his f… There’d been some Boston people out to… And experts said that deep down in the m… The mica sheets were big as plate-glass…
It was long I lay Awake that night Wishing that night Would name the hour And tell me whether
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… Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heave…
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 I had to perish twice,
The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never anymore the dead. The verses in it say and say:
The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart
I slumbered with your poems on my breast Spread open as I dropped them half-read… Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb To see, if in a dream they brought of yo… I might not have the chance I missed in…
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.
Once when the snow of the year was begin… We stopped by a mountain pasture to say… A little Morgan had one forefoot on the… The other curled at his breast. He dipp… And snorted at us. And then he had to b…
Before man to blow to right The wind once blew itself untaught, And did its loudest day and night In any rough place where it caught. Man came to tell it what was wrong:
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
Others taunt me with having knelt at wel… Always wrong to the light, so never seei… Deeper down in the well than where the w… Gives me back in a shining surface pictu… Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, And with these sky-flakes down in flurry… There is more unmixed color on the wing Than flowers will show for days unless t… But these are flowers that fly and all b…
Always the same, when on a fated night At last the gathered snow lets down as w… As may be in dark woods, and with a song It shall not make again all winter long Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground,
Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air That crossed me from sweet things,
This saying good-bye on the edge of the… And cold to an orchard so young in the b… Reminds me of all that can happen to har… An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the h…
Love and forgetting might have carried t… A little further up the mountain side With night so near, but not much further… They must have halted soon in any case With thoughts of a path back, how rough…
They sent him back to her. The letter c… Saying... And she could have him. And b… She could be sure there was no hidden il… Under the formal writing, he was in her… Living. They gave him back to her alive
The farm house lingers, though averse to… With the new city street it has to wear… But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow—crook… I ask as one who knew the brook, its str…
Builder, in building the little house, In every way you may please yourself; But please please me in the kitchen chim… Don’t build me a chimney upon a shelf. However far you must go for bricks,
The west was getting out of gold, The breath of air had died of cold, When shoeing home across the white, I thought I saw a bird alight. In summer when I passed the place
He halted in the wind, and– what was th… Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost… He stood there bringing March against h… And yet too ready to believe the most. ‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,' I s…
From where I lingered in a lull in Marc… outside the sugar-house one night for ch… I called the fireman with a careful voic… And bade him leave the pan and stoke the… ‘O fireman, give the fire another stoke,
Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons. I make a great noise
The sound of the closing outside door wa… You made no sound in the grass with your… As far as you went from the door, which… But you had awakened under the morning s… The first song-bird that awakened all th…
All crying, ‘We will go with you, O Wi… The foliage follow him, leaf and stem; But a sleep oppresses them as they go, And they end by bidding them as they go, And they end by bidding him stay with th…
To think to know the country and now kno… The hillside on the day the sun lets go Ten million silver lizards out of snow! As often as I’ve seen it done before I can’t pretend to tell the way it’s don…
A plow, they say, to plow the snow. They cannot mean to plant it, no— Unless in bitterness to mock At having cultivated rock.
(To hear us talk) The tree the tempest with a crash of woo… Throws down in front of us is not bar Our passage to our journey’s end for goo… But just to ask us who we think we are
It snowed in spring on earth so dry and… The flakes could find no landing place t… Hordes spent themselves to make it wet a… And still they failed of any lasting hol… They made no white impression on the bla…
It went many years, But at last came a knock, And I thought of the door With no lock to lock. I blew out the light,
The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house tha… Like a pistil after the petals go The barn opposed across the way,
