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New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire
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New Hampshire

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First published in 1923, “New Hampshire” by famed American poet Robert Frost, is one of the most beautiful and famous collection of poems in American literature. The book contains many of Frost’s most well-known and beloved poems, such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, “Fire and Ice”, and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”. Frost won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for “New Hampshire” and he would go on to be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetry and was named the poet laureate of Vermont in 1961. Frost’s immortal poems have become an essential part of the fabric of American culture and continue to inspire modern poets, authors, film makers, and artists. Some of literature’s most famous and often quoted lines may be found in this collection by a true master of verse. Frost taught English for many years and encouraged his students to capture the various inflections, tones, and cadences of the spoken English language in his writing, an approach he perfected in his own work and referred to as “the sound of sense”. This timeless collection belongs in the library of everyone who appreciates American literature and poetry. This edition includes the woodcut illustrations by J. J. Lankes which appeared in the first edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 24, 2019
ISBN9781420961867
Author

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet. Born in San Francisco, Frost moved with his family to Lawrence, Massachusetts following the death of his father, a teacher and editor. There, he attended Lawrence High School and went on to study for a brief time at Dartmouth College before returning home to work as a teacher, factory worker, and newspaper delivery person. Certain of his calling as a poet, Frost sold his first poem in 1894, embarking on a career that would earn him acclaim and honor unlike any American poet before or since. Before his paternal grandfather’s death, he purchased a farm in Derry, New Hampshire for Robert and his wife Elinor. For the next decade, Frost worked on the farm while writing poetry in the mornings before returning to teaching once more. In 1912, having moved to England, Frost published A Boy’s Will, his first book of poems. Through the next several years, he wrote and published poetry while befriending such writers as Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound. In 1915, after publishing North of Boston (1914) in London, Frost returned to the United States to settle on another farm in Franconia, New Hampshire, where he continued writing and teaching and began lecturing. Over the next several decades, Frost published numerous collections of poems, including New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (1924) and Collected Poems (1931), winning a total of four Pulitzer Prizes and establishing his reputation as the foremost American poet of his generation.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In 1923 Robert Frost published his Selected Poems in the spring followed by this collection in November. The following year he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for it. In addition to the titular poem this collection includes the famous "Fire and Ice", a short poem with resonance from Dante and others.
    One of my favorites is "The Onset" that seems an appropriate poem to meditate upon as spring approaches. I think we can see a hint of Dante again in this poem with "the dark woods", and there is also the symbolism of winter coming, of snow falling, a beautiful imagery that a time will descend upon us where our lives are dull, tragic, painful or lonely. Yet in the second stanza hope appears with the recognition that "winter death has never tried the earth but it has failed:". By the end of the poem the transition from death to life is complete when one contrasts the white of "the gathered snow" at night to the living white of the birch tree and hope in family life symbolized by "a clump of houses" and the spiritual life of the church.

    "Nothing will be left of white but here a birch,
    And there a clump of houses with a church."

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New Hampshire - Robert Frost

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New Hampshire

By Robert Frost

Woodcuts by J. J. Lankes

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6185-0

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-6186-7

This edition copyright © 2019. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of Twilight, Beech Woods (w/c), by James Thomas Watts (1853-1930) / Private Collection / Photo © Chris Beetles Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images.

Please visit www.digireads.com

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CONTENTS

NEW HAMPSHIRE

New Hampshire

NOTES

A Star in a Stone-Boat

The Census-Taker

The Star-Splitter

Maple

The Axe-Helve

The Grindstone

Paul’s Wife

Wild Grapes

Place for a Third

Two Witches

I. THE WITCH OF COÖS

II. THE PAUPER WITCH OF GRAFTON

An Empty Threat

A Fountain, A Bottle, A Donkey’s Ears And Some Books

I Will Sing You One-O

GRACE NOTES

Fragmentary Blue

Fire and Ice

In A Disused Graveyard

Dust of Snow

To E. T.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

The Runaway

The Aim Was Song

Stopping by Woods on Snowy Evening

For Once, Then, Something

Blue-Butterfly Day

The Onset

To Earthward

Good-Bye and Keep Cold

Two Look at Two

Not to Keep

A Brook in the City

The Kitchen Chimney

Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter

A Boundless Moment

Evening in a Sugar Orchard

Gathering Leaves

The Valley’s Singing Day

Misgiving

A Hillside Thaw

Plowmen

On a Tree Fallen Across the Road

Our Singing Strength

The Lockless Door

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

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NEW HAMPSHIRE

New Hampshire

I met a lady from the South who said

(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):

"None of my family ever worked, or had

A thing to sell." I don’t suppose the work

Much matters. You may work for all of me.

I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.

The having anything to sell{1} is what

Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveller from Arkansas

Who boasted of his state as beautiful

For diamonds and apples. "Diamonds

And apples in commercial quantities?"

I asked him, on my guard. Oh yes, he answered,

Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.

I see the porter’s made your bed, I told him.

I met a Californian who would

Talk California—a state so blessed,

He said, in climate none had ever died there

A natural death, and Vigilance Committees

Had had to organize to stock the graveyards

And vindicate the state’s humanity.

Just the way Steffanson runs on, I murmured,

"About the British Arctic. That’s what comes

Of being in the market with a climate."

I met a poet from another state,

A zealot full of fluid inspiration,

Who in the name of fluid inspiration,

But in the best style of bad salesmanship,

Angrily tried to make me write a protest

(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.

He didn’t even offer me a drink

Until I asked for one to steady him.

This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.

The only person really soiled with trade

I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire

Was someone who had just come back ashamed

From selling things in California.

He’d built a noble mansard roof with balls

On turrets like Constantinople, deep

In woods some ten miles from a railroad station,

As if to put forever out of mind

The hope of being, as we say, received.

I found him standing at the close of day

Inside the threshold of his open barn,

Like a lone actor on a gloomy stage—

And recognized him through the iron grey

In which his face was muffled to the eyes

As an old boyhood friend, and once indeed

A drover with me on the road to Brighton.

His farm was grounds, and not a farm at all;

His house among the local sheds and shanties

Rose like a factor’s at a trading station.

And he was rich, and I was still a rascal.

I couldn’t keep from asking impolitely,

Where had he been and what had he been doing?

How did he get so? (Rich was understood.)

In dealing in old rags in San Francisco.

Oh it was terrible as well could be.

We both of us turned over in our graves.

Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,

One each of everything as in a show-case

Which naturally she doesn’t care to sell.

She had one President (pronounce him Purse,

And make the most of it for better or worse.

He’s your one chance to score against the state).

She had one Daniel Webster. He was all

The Daniel Webster ever was or shall be.

She had the Dartmouth needed to produce him.

I call her old. She has one family

Whose claim is good to being settled here

Before the era of colonization,

And before that of exploration even.

John Smith remarked them as he coasted by

Dangling their legs and fishing off a wharf

At the Isles of Shoals, and satisfied himself

They weren’t Red Indians but veritable

Pre-primitives of the white race, dawn people,

Like those who furnished Adam’s sons with wives;

However uninnocent they may have been

In being there so early in our history.

They’d been there then a hundred years or more.

Pity he didn’t ask what they were up to

At that date with a wharf already built,

And take their

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