New Hampshire Robert Frost (books you need to read TXT) đ
![](/uploads/posts/books/2/8/6/7/4/kniga-new-hampshire.jpg)
- Author: Robert Frost
Book online «New Hampshire Robert Frost (books you need to read TXT) đ». Author Robert Frost
No matter that the meaning was not clear.
A name with meaning could bring up a child,
Taking the child out of the parentsâ hands.
Better a meaningless name, I should say,
As leaving more to nature and happy chance.
Name children some names and see what you do. The Axe-Helve
Iâve known ere now an interfering branch
Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me.
But that was in the woods, to hold my hand
From striking at another alderâs roots,
And that was, as I say, an alder branch.
This was a man, Baptiste, who stole one day
Behind me on the snow in my own yard
Where I was working at the chopping-block,
And cutting nothing not cut down already.
He caught my axe expertly on the rise,
When all my strength put forth was in his favor,
Held it a moment where it was, to calm me,
Then took it from meâ âand I let him take it.
I didnât know him well enough to know
What it was all about. There might be something
He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor
He might prefer to say to him disarmed.
But all he had to tell me in French-English
Was what he thought ofâ ânot me, but my axe;
Me only as I took my axe to heart.
It was the bad axe-helve some one had sold meâ â
âMade on machine,â he said, ploughing the grain
With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran
Across the handleâs long drawn serpentine,
Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.
âYou give her one good crack, sheâs snap raght off.
Den whereâs your hax-ead flying târough de hair?â
Admitted; and yet, what was that to him?
âCome on my house and I put you one in
Whatâs lasâ awhileâ âgood hickâry whatâs grow crooked,
De second growtâ I cut myselfâ âtough, tough!â
Something to sell? That wasnât how it sounded.
âDen when you say you come? Itâs cost you nothing.
To-naght?â
As well to-night as any night.
Beyond an over-warmth of kitchen stove
My welcome differed from no other welcome.
Baptiste knew best why I was where I was.
So long as he would leave enough unsaid,
I shouldnât mind his being overjoyed
(If overjoyed he was) at having got me
Where I must judge if what he knew about an axe
That not everybody else knew was to count
For nothing in the measure of a neighbor.
Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees,
A Frenchman couldnât get his human rating!
Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair
That had as many motions as the world:
One back and forward, in and out of shadow,
That got her nowhere; one more gradual,
Sideways, that would have run her on the stove
In time, had she not realized her danger
And caught herself up bodily, chair and all,
And set herself back where she started from.
âShe ainât spick too much Henglishâ âdatâs too bad.â
I was afraid, in brightening first on me,
Then on Baptiste, as if she understood
What passed between us, she was only feigning.
Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more
Than for himself, so placed he couldnât hope
To keep his bargain of the morning with me
In time to keep me from suspecting him
Of really never having meant to keep it.
Needlessly soon he had his axe-helves out,
A quiverful to choose from, since he wished me
To have the best he had, or had to spareâ â
Not for me to ask which, when what he took
Had beauties he had to point me out at length
To insure their not being wasted on me.
He liked to have it slender as a whipstock,
Free from the least knot, equal to the strain
Of bending like a sword across the knee.
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work. He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the axe-head.
âHahn, hahn,â he mused, âdonât need much taking down.â
Baptiste knew how to make a short job long
For love of it, and yet not waste time either.
Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?
Baptiste on his defence about the children
He kept from school, or did his best to keepâ â
Whatever school and children and our doubts
Of laid-on education had to do
With the curves of his axe-helves and his having
Used these unscrupulously to bring me
To see for once the inside of his house.
Was I desired in friendship, partly as some one
To leave it to, whether the right to hold
Such doubts of education should depend
Upon the education of those who held them?
But now he brushed the shavings from his knee
And stood the axe there on its horseâs hoof,
Erect, but not without its waves, as when
The snake stood up for evil in the Gardenâ â
Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,
Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a littleâ âa French touch in that.
Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased;
âSee how sheâs cock her head!â
Having a wheel and four legs of its own
Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.
These hands have helped it go, and even race;
Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,
Not all the miles it may have thought it went,
Have got it one step from the starting place.
It stands beside the same old apple tree.
The shadow of the apple tree is thin
Upon it now, its feet are fast in snow.
All other farm machineryâs gone in,
And some of it on no more legs and wheel
Than the grindstone can boast to stand or go.
(Iâm thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.)
For months it hasnât known the taste of steel,
Washed down with rusty water in a tin.
But standing outdoors hungry, in the cold,
Except in towns at night, is not a sin.
And, anyway, its standing in the yard
Under a ruinous live apple tree
Has nothing any more to do with me,
Except that I remember how of old
One summer day, all day I drove it hard,
And someone mounted on it rode it hard,
And he and I between us ground a blade.
I gave it the preliminary spin,
And poured on water (tears it might have been);
And when it
Comments (0)