North of Boston Robert Frost (desktop ebook reader TXT) đ
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- Author: Robert Frost
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âPretty,â he said. âCome in. No one will care.â
The path was a vague parting in the grass
That led us to a weathered window-sill.
We pressed our faces to the pane. âYou see,â he said,
âEverythingâs as she left it when she died.
Her sons wonât sell the house or the things in it.
They say they mean to come and summer here
Where they were boys. They havenât come this year.
They live so far awayâ âone is out westâ â
It will be hard for them to keep their word.
Anyway they wonât have the place disturbed.â
A buttoned hair-cloth lounge spread scrolling arms
Under a crayon portrait on the wall
Done sadly from an old daguerreotype.
âThat was the father as he went to war.
She always, when she talked about war,
Sooner or later came and leaned, half knelt
Against the lounge beside it, though I doubt
If such unlifelike lines kept power to stir
Anything in her after all the years.
He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg,
I ought to knowâ âit makes a difference which:
Fredericksburg wasnât Gettysburg, of course.
But what Iâm getting to is how forsaken
A little cottage this has always seemed;
Since she went more than ever, but beforeâ â
I donât mean altogether by the lives
That had gone out of it, the father first,
Then the two sons, till she was left alone.
(Nothing could draw her after those two sons.
She valued the considerate neglect
She had at some cost taught them after years.)
I mean by the worldâs having passed it byâ â
As we almost got by this afternoon.
It always seems to me a sort of mark
To measure how far fifty years have brought us.
Why not sit down if you are in no haste?
These doorsteps seldom have a visitor.
The warping boards pull out their own old nails
With none to tread and put them in their place.
She had her own idea of things, the old lady.
And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison
And Whittier, and had her story of them.
One wasnât long in learning that she thought
Whatever else the Civil War was for
It wasnât just to keep the States together,
Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both.
She wouldnât have believed those ends enough
To have given outright for them all she gave.
Her giving somehow touched the principle
That all men are created free and equal.
And to hear her quaint phrasesâ âso removed
From the worldâs view today of all those things.
Thatâs a hard mystery of Jeffersonâs.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isnât true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.
You couldnât tell her what the West was saying,
And what the South to her serene belief.
She had some art of hearing and yet not
Hearing the latter wisdom of the world.
White was the only race she ever knew.
Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never.
But how could they be made so very unlike
By the same hand working in the same stuff?
She had supposed the war decided that.
What are you going to do with such a person?
Strange how such innocence gets its own way.
I shouldnât be surprised if in this world
It were the force that would at last prevail.
Do you know but for her there was a time
When to please younger members of the church,
Or rather say non-members in the church,
Whom we all have to think of nowadays,
I would have changed the Creed a very little?
Not that she ever had to ask me not to;
It never got so far as that; but the bare thought
Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,
And of her half asleep was too much for me.
Why, I might wake her up and startle her.
It was the words âdescended into Hadesâ
That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.
You know they suffered from a general onslaught.
And well, if they werenât true why keep right on
Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.
Onlyâ âthere was the bonnet in the pew.
Such a phrase couldnât have meant much to her.
But suppose she had missed it from the Creed
As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,
And falls asleep with heartacheâ âhow should I feel?
Iâm just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favour.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pains of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravansâ â
âThere are bees in this wall.â He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.
âYou ought to have seen what I saw on my way
To the village, through Mortensonâs pasture today:
Blueberries as big as the end of your thumb,
Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum
In the cavernous pail of the first one to come!
And all ripe together, not some of them green
And some of them ripe! You ought to have seen!â
âI donât know what part of the pasture you mean.â
âYou know where they cut off the woodsâ âlet me seeâ â
It was two years agoâ âor no!â âcan it be
No longer than that?â âand the following fall
The fire ran and burned it all up but the wall.â
âWhy, there hasnât been time for the bushes to grow.
Thatâs always the way with the blueberries, though:
There may not have been the ghost of a sign
Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine,
But get the pine out of the way, you may burn
The pasture all over until not a fern
Or grass-blade
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