American Stories Four Poems by Robert Frost - May 15, 2023

0:00Few American poets are as well known as Robert Frost. Although he was born in San Francisco in 1874, Frost is forever linked with New England where he lived and farmed. Many of his poems are stories containing New Englanders' ways of speaking and words. Frost won many honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes for his poems. In 1960 he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Many Americans remember him for reciting from memory His Poem The Gift Outright at the Swearing-In of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 Here are four well-known poems by the New England poet as they were written without changes. Each contains a kind of story. We define only a few of the words, so try to discover words you do not know

1:23And see how the words make sense in more than one way. First is a poem about harvesting fruit called After Apple Picking. The next, my November guest, is about the weather right before New England's winter begins. Following that is The Road Not Taken, which is probably Frost's best-known poem. The final piece, The Mending Wall, is about fences and neighbors. Here is Mario Ritter, Jr., with four of Robert Frost's poems. After apple-picking, my long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree toward heaven still. And there's a barrel beside it, and there may be two or three apples I didn't pick upon some bough But I am done with apple-picking now Essence of winter sleep is on the night The scent of apples, I am drowsing off

2:49I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass It melted and I let it fall and break, But I was well upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell what form my dreaming was about to take. Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder round. I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend, And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much of apple-picking, I am overtired of the great harvest

4:05I myself desired. There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down and not let fall, For all that struck the earth, no matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap, as of no worth. One can see what will trouble this sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone the woodchuck could say whether it's like his long sleep as I describe its coming on or just some human sleep. My November Guest My sorrow when she's here with me thinks these dark days of autumn rain are beautiful As days can be. She loves the bare, the withered tree. She walks the sodden pasture lane. Her pleasure will not let me stay. She talks and I am fain to list. She's glad the birds are gone away.

5:30She's Glad her simple worsted gray Is silver now with clinging mist. The desolate, deserted trees, The faded earth, the heavy sky, The beauties she so truly sees. She thinks I have no eye for these And vexes me for reason why. 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 the road not taken two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry i could not travel both and be one traveler long i stood and looked down one as far as i could to 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

6:52as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same and both that morning equally lay in 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 sigh, Somewhere 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. 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 repair, Where 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.

8:33i let my neighbor know beyond the hill and on a day we meet to walk the line and set the wall between us once again we keep the wall be tween us as we go to each the boulders that have fallen to each and some are loaves and some so nearly balls we have to use a spell to make them balance stay where you are until our backs are turned we wear our fingers rough with handling them oh just another kind of outdoor 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 across, and 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 wonder if i could put a notion in his head why do they make good neighbours

9:59Isn't it where there are cows? But here there are no cows. Before I built a wall, I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling out, and to whom I was like to give offense.

10:20Something 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 rather he said it for himself. I see him there, bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top in each hand, like an old stone savage armed. He moves, in darkness as it seems to me, not 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 well. He says again, Good fences make good neighbors.