The Pasture by Robert Frost

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear I may):

I shan't be gone long.---You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I shan't be gone long.---You come too.

The Telephone
'When I was just as far as I could walk

From here today,

There was an hour

All still

When leaning with my head again a flower

I heard you talk.

Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say--

You spoke from that flower on the window sill-

Do you remember what it was you said?'

'First tell me what it was you thought you heard.'

'Having found the flower and driven a bee away,

I leaned on my head

And holding by the stalk,

I listened and I thought I caught the word—

What was it? Did you call me by my name?

Or did you say--

Someone said "Come" -- I heard it as I bowed.'

'I may have thought as much, but not aloud.'

"Well, so I came.'

Departmental
An ant on the tablecloth

Ran into a dormant moth

Of many times his size.

He showed not the least surprise.

His business wasn't with such.

He gave it scarcely a touch,

And was off on his duty run.

Yet if he encountered one

Of the hive's enquiry squad

Whose work is to find out God

And the nature of time and space,

He would put him onto the case.

Ants are a curious race;

One crossing with hurried tread

The body of one of their dead

Isn't given a moment's arrest-

Seems not even impressed.

But he no doubt reports to any

With whom he crosses antennae,

And they no doubt report

To the higher-up at court.

Then word goes forth in Formic:

"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,

Our selfless forager Jerry.

Will the special Janizary

Whose office it is to bury

The dead of the commissary

Go bring him home to his people.

Lay him in state on a sepal.

Wrap him for shroud in a petal.

Embalm him with ichor of nettle.

This is the word of your Queen."

And presently on the scene

Appears a solemn mortician;

And taking formal position,

With feelers calmly atwiddle,

Seizes the dead by the middle,

And heaving him high in air,

Carries him out of there.

No one stands round to stare.

It is nobody else's affair

It couldn't be called ungentle

But how thoroughly departmental

Mowing
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

The Wood-Pile
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,

I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.

No, I will go on farther -- and we shall see."

The hard snow held me, save where now and then

One foot went through. The view was all in lines

Straight up and down of tall slim trees

Too much alike to mark or name a place by

So as to say for certain I was here

Or somewhere else: I was just far from home.

A small bird flew before me. He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather --

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself.

One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

It was a cord of maple, cut and split

And piled -- and measured, four by four by eight.

And not another like it could I see.

No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.

And it was older sure than this year's cutting,

Or even last year's or the year's before.

The wood was gray and the bark warping off it

And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis

Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle.

What held it though on one side was a tree

Still growing, and on one a stake and prop,

These latter about to fall. I thought that only

Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks

Could so forget his handiwork on which

He spent himself, the labor of his ax,

And leave it there far from a useful fireplace

To warm the frozen swamp as best it could

With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

The Bear
The bear puts both arms around the tree above her

And draws it down as if it were a lover

And its chokecherries lips to kiss good-by,

Then lets it snap back upright in the sky.

Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall

(She's making her cross-country in the fall).

Her great weight creaks the barbed wire in its staples

As she flings over and off down through the maples,

Leaving on one wire tooth a lock of hair.

Such is the uncaged progress of the bear.

The world has room to make a bear feel free;

The universe seems cramped to you and me.

Man acts more like the poor bear in a cage,

That all day fights a nervous inward rage,

His mood rejecting all his mind suggests.

He paces back and forth and never rests

The me-nail click and shuffle of his feet,

The telescope at one end of his beat,

And at the other end the microscope,

Two instruments of nearly equal hope,

And in conjunction giving quite a spread.

Or if he rests from scientific tread,

'Tis only to sit back and sway his head

Through ninety-odd degrees of arc, it seems,

Between two metaphysical extremes.

He sits back on his fundamental butt

With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut

(He almost looks religious but he's not),

And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,

At one extreme agreeing with one Greek

At the other agreeing with another Greek

Which may be thought, but only so to speak.

A baggy figure, equally pathetic

When sedentary and when peripatetic.

THE NEED OF BEING VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS
The house had gone to bring again

To the midnight sky a sunset glow.

Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,

Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,

That would have joined the house in flame

Had it been the will of the wind, was left

To bear forsaken the place's name.

No more it opened with all one end

For teams that came by the stony road

To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs

And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air

At broken windows flew out and in,

Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh

From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.