Robert Frost

1. Robert Frost 一年仁班 39號 蔡宛妤

2. Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent. In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912,

3. after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.

4. Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January 29, 1963, in Boston. This bio was last updated on Apr 4, 2002.

5. Bibliography • Brower, Reuben A., The Poetry of Robert Frost (1963) • Brunshaw, Stanley, Robert Frost Himself (1986) • Clymer, W. B. S., Robert Frost: A Bibliography (1972) • Egmond, Peter Van, The Critical Reception of Robert Frost: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Comment (1974) • Frost, Robert, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. by Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969) • -----, Selected Letters, ed. by Lawrance Thompson (1964) • -----, Selected Prose, ed. by Lathem and Hyde Cox (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966) • -----, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays: Complete Poems 1949, In the Clearing, Uncollected Poems, Plays, Lectures, Essays, Stories, and Letters (The Library of America, 1995)

6. Gerber, Philip L., Robert Frost (1966) -----, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Frost (1982) Hall, D., Robert Frost: Contours of Belief (1980) Katz, S.L., Elinor Frost (1988) Lathem, E.C., ed., Robert Frost's Poetry and Prose (1984) Lentricchia, Frank, and Lentricchia, Melissa Christian, Robert Frost: A Bibliography, 1913-1974 (1976) Marcus, Mordecai, The Poems of Robert Frost: An Explication (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991) Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost (1977) Potter, James L., Robert Frost Handbook (1980) Pritchard, William H., Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (1984) Thompson, Lawrance, Robert Frost, 3 vols. (1966-76) Thompson, L., and Winnick, R.H., Robert Frost: A Biography, ed. by E.C. Lathem (1981) Walsh, John Evangelist, Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912-1915 (1988)

7. Poems By Robert Frost • ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT • BIRCHES • MENDING WALL • OUT OUT • THE ROAD NOT TAKEN • STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING • THE RUNAWAY • TWO LOOK AT TWO

8. ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT • I have been one acquainted with the night.I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.I have outwalked the furthest city light. • I have looked down the saddest city lane.I have passed by the watchman on his beatAnd dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. • I have stood still and stopped the sound of feetWhen far away an interrupted cryCame over houses from another street, • But not to call me back or say good-bye;And further still at an unearthly height,O luminary clock against the sky • Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.I have been one acquainted with the night. back

9. BIRCHES When I see birches bend to left and rightAcross the lines of straighter darker trees,I like to think some boy's been swinging them.But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen themLoaded with ice a sunny winter morningAfter a rain. They click upon themselvesAs the breeze rises, and turn many-colouredAs the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shellsShattering and avalanching on the snow-crustSuch heaps of broken glass to sweep awayYou'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,And they seem not to break; though once they are bowedSo low for long, they never right themselves:You may see their trunks arching in the woods Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground, Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

10. Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.But I was going to say when Truth broke inWith all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,I should prefer to have some boy bend themAs he went out and in to fetch the cows--Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,Whose only play was what he found himself,Summer or winter, and could play alone.One by one he subdued his father's treesBy riding them down over and over againUntil he took the stiffness out of them,And not one but hung limp, not one was leftFor him to conquer. He learned all there wasTo learn about not launching out too soonAnd so not carrying the tree awayClear to the ground. He always kept his poiseTo the top branches, climbing carefullyWith the same pains you use to fill a cupUp to the brim, and even above the brim.Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

11. 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 woodWhere your face burns and tickles with the cobwebsBroken across it, and one eye is weepingFrom a twig's having lashed across it open.I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot 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 by climbing a birch treeAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward 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. back

12. MENDING WALL • Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,And spills the upper boulders in the sun,And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.The work of hunters is another thing:I have come after them and made repairWhere they have left not one stone on a stone,But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,No one has seen them made or heard them made,But at spring mending-time we find them there.I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;And on a day we meet to walk the lineAnd set the wall between us once again.We keep the wall between us as we go.To each the boulders that have fallen to each.And some are loaves and some so nearly ballsWe have to use a spell to make them balance:

13. 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'We wear our fingers rough with handling them.Oh, just another kind of out-door game,One on a side. It comes to little more:There where it is we do not need the wall:He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get acrossAnd eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't itWhere there are cows?But here there are no cows.Before I built a wall I'd ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offense.Something there is that doesn't love a wall,That wants it down.' I could say '.Elves' to him,But it's not elves exactly, and I'd ratherHe said it for himself. I see him there

14. Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the topIn each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.He moves in darkness as it seems to meNot of woods only and the shade of trees.He will not go behind his father's saying,And he likes having thought of it so wellHe says again, "Good fences make good neighbors." back

15. OUT OUT • The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yardAnd made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.And from there those that lifted eyes could countFive mountain ranges one behind the otherUnder the sunset far into Vermont.And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,As it ran light, or had to bear a load.And nothing happened: day was all but done.Call it a day, I wish they might have saidTo please the boy by giving him the half hourThat a boy counts so much when saved from work.His sister stood beside them in her apronTo tell them 'Supper'. At the word, the saw,As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap--He must have given the hand. However it was,Neither refused the meeting. But the hand! The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh.

16. As he swung toward them holding up the handHalf in appeal, but half as if to keepThe life from spilling. Then the boy saw all--Since he was old enough to know, big boyDoing a man's work, though a child at heart--He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand offThe doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'So. But the hand was gone already.The doctor put him in the dark of ether.He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright.No one believed. They listened at his heart.Little -- less -- nothing! -- and that ended it.No more to build on there. And they, since theyWere not the one dead, turned to their affairs. back

17. THE ROAD NOT TAKEN Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, as just as fair,And having perhaps the better claim,Because it was grassy and wanted wear;Though as for that the passing thereHad worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally layIn leaves no step had trodden black.Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. back

18. 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 hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow. • My little horse must think it queerTo stop without a farmhouse nearBetween the woods and frozen lakeThe darkest evening of the year. • He gives his harness bells a shakeTo ask if there is some mistake.The only other sound's the sweepOf 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. back

19. THE RUNAWAY • Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,We stopped by a mountain pasture to say 'Whose colt?'A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,The other curled at his breast. He dipped his headAnd snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.He isn't winter-broken. It isn't playWith the little fellow at all. He's running away.I doubt if even his mother could tell him, "Sakes,It's only weather". He'd think she didn't know !Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'And now he comes again with a clatter of stoneAnd mounts the wall again with whited eyesAnd all his tail that isn't hair up straight.He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.'Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,Ought to be told to come and take him in.' back

20. TWO LOOK AT TWO • Love and forgetting might have carried themA little further up the mountain sideWith night so near, but not much further up.They must have halted soon in any caseWith thoughts of a path back, how rough it wasWith rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;When they were halted by a tumbled wallWith barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,Spending what onward impulse they still hadIn One last look the way they must not go,On up the failing path, where, if a stoneOr earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.A doe from round a spruce stood looking at themAcross the wall, as near the wall as they.She saw them in their field, they her in hers.The difficulty of seeing what stood still,

21. Like some up-ended boulder split in two,Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.Then, as if they were something that, though strange,She could not trouble her mind with too long,She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.'This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?'But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.A buck from round the spruce stood looking at themAcross the wall as near the wall as they.This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,Not the same doe come back into her place.He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,As if to ask, 'Why don't you make some motion?Or give some sign of life? Because you can't.I doubt if you're as living as you look."Thus till he had them almost feeling daredTo stretch a proffering hand -- and a spell-breaking. Then he too passed unscared along the wall.

22. Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.'This must be all.' It was all. Still they stood,A great wave from it going over them,As if the earth in one unlooked-for favourHad made them certain earth returned their love. back