A Leaf Treader by Robert Frost

A Leaf Treader

I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn tired
Lord knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired
Perhaps I have put forth too much strength or been too fierce from fear...

I have safely trodden underfoot the leaves of another year
All summer long they were overhead more lifted up than I
To come to their final place in earth they had to pass me by

All summer long I thought I heard them whispering under their breath
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with them to death
They spoke to the fugitive in my heart as if it were leaf to leaf

They tapped at my eyelids and touched my lips with an invitation to grief
But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go...
Now up my knee to keep atop another year of snow.


 

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Desert Places by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
WIth no expression, nothing to express.

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.

After Apple-picking by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree   
Toward heaven still,   
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill   
Beside it, and there may be two or three   
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.            5
But I am done with apple-picking now.   
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,   
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.   
I 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 I 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.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of 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.



Here is my reading of the poem

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

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.
I 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 between 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 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 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 neighbors? Isn'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 offence.
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 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 neighbours."