New Hampshire Robert Frost (books you need to read TXT) š
![](/uploads/posts/books/2/8/6/7/4/kniga-new-hampshire.jpg)
- Author: Robert Frost
Book online Ā«New Hampshire Robert Frost (books you need to read TXT) šĀ». Author Robert Frost
Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.
Nothing was left to do that I could see
Unless to find that there was no one there
And declare to the cliffs too far for echo
āThe place is desert and let whoso lurks
In silence, if in this he is aggrieved,
Break silence now or be forever silent.
Let him say why it should not be declared so.ā
The melancholy of having to count souls
Where they grow fewer and fewer every year
Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.
It must be I want life to go on living. The Star-Splitter
āYou know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orionās having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?ā
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a life-long curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
āWhat do you want with one of those blame things?ā
I asked him well beforehand. āDonāt you get one!ā
āDonāt call it blamed; there isnāt anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,ā he said.
āIāll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.ā
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldnāt move
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
āThe best thing that weāre put here forās to see;
The strongest thing thatās given us to see withās
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me.ā
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we werenāt the least imposed on,
And he could waitā āweād see to him to-morrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldnāt take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We donāt cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldnāt do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given oneās gift for Christmas,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isnāt sentient; the house
Didnāt feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?
Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasnāt selling tickets,
Was setting out up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.19
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didnāt do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
Itās a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
āSa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
Weāve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night to-night
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
Her teacherās certainty it must be Mabel
Made Maple first take notice of her name.
She asked her father and he told her āMapleā ā
Maple is right.ā
āBut teacher told the school
Thereās no such name.ā
āTeachers donāt know as much
As fathers about children, you tell teacher.
You tell her that itās M-A-P-L-E.
You ask her if she knows a maple tree.
Well, you were named after a maple tree.
Your mother named you. You and she just saw
Each other in passing in the room upstairs,
One coming this way into life, and one
Going the other out of lifeā āyou know?
So you canāt have much recollection of her.
She had been having a long look at you.
She put her finger in your cheek so hard
It must have made your dimple there, and said,
āMaple.ā I said it too: āYes, for her name.ā
She nodded. So weāre sure thereās no mistake.
I donāt know what she wanted it to mean,
But it seems like some word she left to bid you
Be a good girlā ābe like a maple tree.
How like a maple treeās for us to guess.
Or for a little girl to guess sometime.
Not nowā āat least I shouldnāt try
Comments (0)