New Hampshire
By Robert Frost
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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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Reviews for New Hampshire
10 ratings1 review
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In 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."
Book preview
New Hampshire - Robert Frost
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.
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img2.pngCONTENTS
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
img3.pngimg4.pngNEW 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