Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Not to Keep

THEY sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying … and she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was in her sight—
Living.—They gave him back to her alive— 5
How else? They are not known to send the dead—
And not disfigured visibly. His face?—
His hands? She had to look—to ask,
“What was it, dear?” And she had given all
And still she had all—they had—they the lucky! 10
Was n’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, “What was it, dear?”
“Enough,
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through, 15
High in the breast. Nothing but what good care
And medicine and rest—and you a week,
Can cure me of to go again.” The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
She dared no more than ask him with her eyes 20
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.

George Herbert Clarke, ed. (1873–1953). A Treasury of War Poetry. 1917.

________
Poet Robert Frost was born in San Francisco (1874). His father was a journalist and a hard drinker who died of tuberculosis when Frost was 11 years old. Frost moved with his mother to New England to live near family. He didn't do well in college. He dropped out of both Dartmouth and Harvard without taking a degree. He wanted to marry his high school sweetheart and tried to impress her with a book of poems he'd written. When she wasn't impressed, he considered drowning himself in a swamp, but decided not to go through with it at the last minute.

He finally married the girl and supported himself as a teacher for a few years, writing poetry on the side. Then, in 1900, he and his wife lost their first child, which sent Frost into a deep despair. So his grandfather took pity on him and bought him a farm in Derry, New Hampshire, in hopes that it would give him a steady income. Frost never really took to farming, but it gave him something to write about, and it was in those years on the farm that he began to write the poems that would make his name.

He published his first two collections, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), the latter of which contains many of Frost's early masterpieces, including "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."
Source: The Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor

Robert Frost
Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

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

*A jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.

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

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

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

*A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

*A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.

*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.

*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.

*But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

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

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

*Education is hanging around until you've caught on.


*"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."

*"Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee, and I'll forgive Thy great big joke on me."

*"Freedom lies in being bold."

*"Happiness makes up in height for what it lacks in length."

*"Hell is a half-filled auditorium."

*"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in."

*"I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."

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

*"I had a lovers quarrel with the world."

*"I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering."

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

*"I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power."

*"I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

*"If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving."

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

*"Life is tons of discipline. Your first discipline is your vocabulary; then your grammar and your punctuation Then, in your exuberance and bounding energy you say you're going to add to that. Then you add rhyme and meter. And your delight is in that power."