Robert Frost

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.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don't stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven't hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

THE FIGURE A POEM MAKES

No one can really hold that ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life- Not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.

A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and ask for it back when it begins to rain.

I may have wept that any should have died Or missed their chance, or not have been their best, Or been their riches, fame, or love denied; On me as much as any is the jest. I take my incompleteness with the rest. God bless himself can no one else be blessed. I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori. And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world.

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

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Don't join too many gangs. Join few if any. Join the United States and join the family — But not much in between, unless a college.