frost

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.

Robert Frost
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We love the things we love for what they are.

Robert Frost
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The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost
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Never be bullied into silence. Never allow yourself to be made a
victim. Accept no ones definition of your life; define yourself.

Robert Frost
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No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.  No surprise in the
writer, no surprise in the reader.

Robert Frost
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Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Robert Frost
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These 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.

Robert Frost, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost
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If we couldn't laugh we would all go insane.

Robert Frost
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Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing
your temper or your self-confidence.

Robert Frost
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Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.

Robert Frost
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Freedom lies in being bold.

Robert Frost
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Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

Robert Frost
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The best way out is always through.

Robert Frost
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Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and
can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying
it.

Robert Frost
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Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length.

Robert Frost
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A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a
homesickness, a lovesickness.

Robert Frost
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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost
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I am not a teacher, but an awakener.

Robert Frost
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Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost
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Forgive me my nonsense as I also forgive the nonsense of those who
think they talk sense.

Robert Frost
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I'm not confused. I'm just well mixed.

Robert Frost
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They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between starson stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take
you in.

Robert Frost
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The rain to the wind said,
You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged--though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt.

Robert Frost
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Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.

Robert Frost
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There are two kinds of teachers: the kind that fill you with so much
quail shot that you can't move, and the kind that just gives you a
little prod behind and you jump to the skies.

Robert Frost
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A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never
remembers her age.

Robert Frost
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To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.

Robert Frost
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I hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way.

Robert Frost
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There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and
won't, and that's a wife who can't cook and will.

Robert Frost
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Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has
found words.

Robert Frost
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Dancing is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.

Robert Frost
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The heart can think of no devotion
Greater than being shore to the ocean -
Holding the curve of one position,
Counting an endless repetition.

Robert Frost
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A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another
woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.

Robert Frost
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I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

Robert Frost
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The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.

Robert Frost
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How many things have to happen to you before something occurs to you?

Robert Frost
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The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people
worry than work.

Robert Frost
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We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost
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Something we were withholding made us weak, until we found it was
ourselves.

Robert Frost
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I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Robert Frost, Birches
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A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better
lawyer.

Robert Frost
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The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, the rest
willing to let them.

Robert Frost
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The middle of the road is where the white line is, and thats the worst
place to drive.

Robert Frost
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The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get
up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.

Robert Frost
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How many things would you attempt
If you knew you could not fail

Robert Frost
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The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Robert Frost
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Before I built a wall I'd ask to know what I was walling in or walling
out.

Robert Frost
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And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my
own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel
with the world.

Robert Frost
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Unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose
in the world.

Robert Frost
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Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That's voting.

Robert Frost
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A good book has no ending

Robert Frost
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I believe in teaching, but I dont believe in going to school.

Robert Frost
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Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

Robert Frost
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You're always believing ahead of your evidence.  What was the evidence
I could write a poem?  I just believed it.  The most creative thing in
us is to believe in a thing.

Robert Frost
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INTO MY OWN

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should eer turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Robert Frost, A Boy's Will
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A person will sometimes devote all his life to the development of one
part of his body - the wishbone.

Robert Frost
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A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Robert Frost
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By faithfully working eight hours a day you may eventually get to be
boss and work twelve hours a day.

Robert Frost
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love
sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find
fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its
thought and the thought has found words.

Robert Frost
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Families break up when they get hints you don't intend and miss hints
that you do.

Robert Frost
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A civilized society is one which tolerates eccentricity to the point
of doubtful sanity.

Robert Frost
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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.

Robert Frost, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
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I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
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For I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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We ran as if to meet the moon.

Robert Frost
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I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Robert Frost
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Anything more than the truth would be too much.

Robert Frost
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I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain - and back in rain.
I have out walked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet.

When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly light,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Robert Frost
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You've got to love what's lovable, and hate what's hateable. It takes
brains to see the difference.

Robert Frost
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I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I
teach in order to learn.

Robert Frost
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Good fences make good neighbors.

Robert Frost
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Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in
and out of favor.

Robert Frost
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Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost, North of Boston
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A bank is a place where they lend you an umbrella in fair weather and
ask for it back when it begins to rain.

Robert Frost
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Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.

Robert Frost
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Every poem is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world.

Robert Frost
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To Earthward
by Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length. 
Robert Frost
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Come over the hills and far with me
And be my love in the rain.

Robert Frost, Complete Poems Of Robert Frost,  1949
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Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given,
and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my
own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

Robert Frost
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The best things and best people rise out of their separateness; I'm
against a homogenized society because I want the cream to rise.

Robert Frost
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Education doesn't change life much. It just lifts trouble to a higher
plane of regard.

Robert Frost
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GATHERING LEAVES
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use.
But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where
The harvest shall stop?
Robert Frost
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When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.
Robert Frost
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I turned to speak to God
About the world's despair
But to make bad matters worse
I found God wasn't there.

Robert Frost
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Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Robert Frost
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A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. 

Robert Frost
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I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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The mind-is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind-
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need learn to let go with the heart.

Robert Frost
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Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
Robert Frost
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What we live by we die by.
Robert Frost
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My sorrow, when she's here with me, thinks these dark days of autumn
rain are beautiful as days can be; she loves the bare, the withered
tree; she walks the sodden pasture lane.

Robert Frost
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Being the boss anywhere is lonely. Being a female boss in a world of
mostly men is especially so.

Robert Frost
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Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost
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For I have had too much
Of apple-picking:I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Robert Frost
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My goal in life is to unite my avocation with my vocation,
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Robert Frost
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The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength. To feel the
earth as rough to all my length
Robert Frost, Complete Poems Of Robert Frost,  1949
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The Trial By Existence

Even the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,
Even as on earth, in paradise;
And where they sought without the sword
Wide fields of asphodel foreer,
To find that the utmost reward
Of daring should be still to dare.

The light of heaven falls whole and white
And is not shattered into dyes,
The light for ever is morning light;
The hills are verdured pasture-wise;
The angel hosts with freshness go,
And seek with laughter what to brave;
And binding all is the hushed snow
Of the far-distant breaking wave.

And from a cliff-top is proclaimed
The gathering of the souls for birth,
The trial by existence named,
The obscuration upon earth.
And the slant spirits trooping by
In streams and cross- and counter-streams
Can but give ear to that sweet cry
For its suggestion of what dreams!

And the more loitering are turned
To view once more the sacrifice
Of those who for some good discerned
Will gladly give up paradise.
And a white shimmering concourse rolls
Toward the throne to witness there
The speeding of devoted souls
Which God makes his especial care.

And none are taken but who will,
Having first heard the life read out
That opens earthward, good and ill,
Beyond the shadow of a doubt;
And very beautifully God limns,
And tenderly, lifes little dream,
But naught extenuates or dims,
Setting the thing that is supreme.

Nor is there wanting in the press
Some spirit to stand simply forth,
Heroic in its nakedness,
Against the uttermost of earth.
The tale of earths unhonored things
Sounds nobler there than neath the sun;
And the mind whirls and the heart sings,
And a shout greets the daring one.

But always God speaks at the end:
One thought in agony of strife
The bravest would have by for friend,
The memory that he chose the life;
But the pure fate to which you go
Admits no memory of choice,
Or the woe were not earthly woe
To which you give the assenting voice.

And so the choice must be again,
But the last choice is still the same;
And the awe passes wonder then,
And a hush falls for all acclaim.
And God has taken a flower of gold
And broken it, and used therefrom
The mystic link to bind and hold
Spirit to matter till death come.

Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.
Robert Frost
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You, of course, are a rose --
But were always a rose.
Robert Frost, You Come Too
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A poet never takes notes..you never take notes in a Love Affair.
Robert Frost
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When I was young, I was so interested in baseball that my family was
afraid I'd waste my life and be a pitcher. Later they were afraid I'd
waste my life and be a poet. They were right.

Robert Frost
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Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace"
metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we
have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and
meaning another. People say, "Why dont you say what you mean?" We
never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk
in parables and in hints and in indirections whether from diffidence
or some other instinct.

Robert Frost
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So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.

Robert Frost
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For dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.

Robert Frost
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Nobody was ever meant to remember or invent what he did with every cent. 
Robert Frost
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Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in
the house. Opening the first takes all the pressure off the second.

Robert Frost
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The strongest and most effective force in guaranteeing the long-term
maintenance of power is not violence in all the forms deployed by the
dominant to control the dominated, but consent in all the forms in
which the dominated acquiesce in their own domination.

Robert Frost
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Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any
considerable amount of learning.

Robert Frost
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It looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a
night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage...

Robert Frost
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The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not,
as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

Robert Frost
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Hope is not found in a way out but a way through.

Robert Frost
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God made a beauteous garden
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said "To you, my children,
These lovely flowers I give.
Prune ye my vines and fig trees,
With care my flowers tend,
But keep the pathway open
Your home is at the end."

God's Garden
Robert Frost
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I do not see why I should eer turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew Only more sure of
all I thought was true.

Robert Frost
%
I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
Robert Frost
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Our very life depends on everythings' recurring til we answer from within.

Robert Frost
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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
Robert Frost
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Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever truly done
For Heaven and the future's sakes
Robert Frost
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Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. 

Robert Frost
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Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.

Robert Frost
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Earth's the right place for love. I don't know where it's likely to go better.

Robert Frost, Swinger of Birches
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The Armful

For every parcel I stoop down to seize
I lose some other off my arms and knees,
And the whole pile is slipping, bottles, buns,
Extremes too hard to comprehend at. once
Yet nothing I should care to leave behind.
With all I have to hold with hand and mind
And heart, if need be, I will do my best.
To keep their building balanced at my breast.
I crouch down to prevent them as they fall;
Then sit down in the middle of them all.
I had to drop the armful in the road
And try to stack them in a better load.
Robert Frost
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I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago.

Robert Frost
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What is done is done for the love of it - or not really done at all.

Robert Frost
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poets are like baseball pitchers. both have their moments. the
intervals are the tough things.
Robert Frost
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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.

Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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En dos palabras puedo resumir cuanto he aprendido acerca de la vida:
Sigue adelante.

Robert Frost
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Keats mourned that the rainbow, which as a boy had been for him a
magic thing, had lost its glory because the physicists had found it
resulted merely from the refraction of the sunlight by the
raindrops. Yet knowledge of its causation could not spoil the rainbow
for me. I am sure that it is not given to man to be omniscient. There
will always be something left to know, something to excite the
imagination of the poet and those attuned to the great world in which
they live (p. 64)

Robert Frost, Interviews With Robert Frost
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Unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.
Robert Frost
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The Master Speed

No speed of wind or water rushing by
but you have speed far greater. You can climb
back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
and back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
but in the rush of everything to waste,
that you may have the power of standing still--
off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
From one another once you are agreed
that life is only life forevermore
together wing to wing and oar to oar.
Robert Frost
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One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Robert Frost, Birches
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Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
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The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I know people who read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work.
Robert Frost
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The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.
Robert Frost
%
A poem is never a put-up job, so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with.
Robert Frost
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A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
Robert Frost
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I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
Robert Frost
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We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.
Robert Frost
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I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
%
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Robert Frost
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A poem begins with a lump in the throat
Robert Frost
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I am one who has been acquainted with the night
Robert Frost
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To be social is to be forgiving.
Robert Frost
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No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
Robert Frost
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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:          5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on 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,   10
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.   15
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.   20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
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.   25
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.   30
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,   35
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,   40
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 neighbors.
Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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Yes, and even for the past...that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was. Something I can accept.  Mistakes made by the self I had to be or was not able to be.
Robert Frost
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I only hope that when I am free,
as they are free to go in quest,
of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life,
it may not seem better to me to rest.
Robert Frost
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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 against 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 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.
Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost
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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 offense.

Robert Frost, North of Boston
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