Robert Frost

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

Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world.

What but design of darkness to appall?- If design govern in a thing so small.

For I have had too much
Of apple-picking:I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Good fences make good neighbors.

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago.

People are inexterminable — like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices — that's us.

Tree At My Window

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.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

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

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.

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.

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

But he sent her Good-by, And said to be good, And wear her red hood, And look for skunk tracks In the snow with an ax — And do everything!

Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever truly done
For Heaven and the future's sakes

So I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference.

I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.