Tuesday, March 26, 2013

3/26/13 Happy Birthday Robert Frost


"The best way out is always through."

"Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

"Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it.” 

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

“Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.”

“What is done is done for the love of it- or not really done at all.” 

"It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound--that he will never get over it."


One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretense 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.
But the world's evil. I won't have grief so
If I can change it. 
~Home Burial 1914


 Our very life depends on everything’s 
Recurring till we answer from within. 
The thousandth time may prove the charm.
~"Snow"  1916

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 hue?
~"Fragmentary Blue" 1920

The present 
Is too much for the senses, 
Too crowding, too confusing- 
Too present to imagine. 
~"Carpe Diem" 1923



They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
~"Desert Places"  1936


A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
~"A Question" 1942

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds' song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came. 
~"Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" 1942
(and my favorite Frost sonnet)



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