Are You Helping?

Ghost House

I've never been much for traditional, literary poetry. But a Robert Frost volume wandered across my social media feed¹, as it's now out of US copyright. I cracked it open and it's hooked me. I'm reading one page a day, more or less.

So to help get back into the blogging rhythm, some of them will get reposted here.

Note there's no commentary, I'm no poetry critic or English teacher. They moved me, one way or another, so they end up here to see if maybe they move you too.

Ghost House

Robert Frost

Ghost House

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
  And left no trace but the cellar walls,
  And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
  The orchard tree has grown one copse
  Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
  On that disused and forgotten road
  That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
  I hear him begin far enough away
  Full many a time to say his say
Before he arrives to say it out.

It is under the small, dim, summer star.
I know not who these mute folk are
  Who share the unlit place with me—
Those stones out under the low-limbed tree
Doubtless bear names that the mosses mar.

They are tireless folk, but slow and sad,
Though two, close-keeping, are lass and lad,—
  With none among them that ever sings,
And yet, in view of how many things,
As sweet companions as might be had.

Author Frost, Robert, 1874-1963
LoC No. 2021656375
Title Collected poems of Robert Frost
Original Publication New York Henry Holt and Company, 1930

Download your own copy ↩

links

social