Robert Frost–”Choose Something Like a Star”

CHOOSE SOMETHING LIKE A STAR
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud –
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
–Robert Frost

Image: Raise your hands by shaggy359

Robert Frost–”Reluctance”

RELUCTANCE
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question “Whither?”

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost

Submitted by Nancy & Charlie Barker in memory of Murray Blume

Robert Frost: “Provide, Provide”

PROVIDE, PROVIDE
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,

The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on simply being true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

–Robert Frost (b. 26 March 1874)

Photo credit: R. Frost in Snow by misterbisson

Robert Frost: “Acquainted with the Night”

Read by Ron Perlman.

Posted by Alaydhien.

Inhabited Memory

In 1967, this “pocket anthology” of Robert Frost‘s poems cost 75 cents. But I didn’t pay a cent for it. I received the volume as a gift for my 11th birthday that December. The small book has survived nearly 40 years of purges of my “personal library,” and it still opens to page 194, on which appears the first of Frost’s poems that I memorized: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

It would seem that my dependence on a material object–the book–to access that poem should have ended the moment I committed the poem to memory. But not quite. That’s because the illustration (by John O’Hara Cosgrave II) printed below the poem is an integral part of my memory of the poem. Yes, it’s quite unremarkable and, after years of evolution in my pondering the poem, it may even be a bit kitschy. The illustration seems to convey little if anything of the complex and tense visual that Frost wrote. Only the large size of the woods relative to the observer seem appropriate in the illustration, and the soothing circular arc.

But, as it happens, the illustration is part of the reason I began to read the book on page 194 in the first place. It caught my eye because it looked like something one would see on a holiday card and, to an 11 year old, holidays meant no school. (The other part of the reason I started on page 194 was the word “snow” in the title; to an 11 year old, snow also meant no school.)

So that’s how the combination of graphic and symbolic text came to inhabit my memory of “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening.”

The back cover of the 75 cent book promises “numberless hours of pleasure and joy.” At the very least.

About 25 other inhabited memories of Frost’s poem turn up on a YouTube search — I hope you will enjoy them.