Poems of Robert Frost. Large Collection, includes A Boy's Will, North of Boston and Mountain Interval by Robert Frost Page B

you’re ask.”
    He doffed his cap and held it with both hands
    Across his chest to make as ’twere a bow:
    “We’re giving you our chances on de farm.”
    And then they all turned to with deafening boots
    And put each other bodily out of the house.
    “Goodby to them! We puzzle them. They think—
    I don’t know what they think we see in what
    They leave us to: that pasture slope that seems
    The back some farm presents us; and your woods
    To northward from your window at the sink,
    Waiting to steal a step on us whenever
    We drop our eyes or turn to other things,
    As in the game ‘Ten-step’ the children play.”
     
    “Good boys they seemed, and let them love the city.
    All they could say was ‘God!’ when you proposed
    Their coming out and making useful farmers.”
     
    “Did they make something lonesome go through you?
    It would take more than them to sicken you—
    Us of our bargain. But they left us so
    As to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.
    They almost shook me.”
     
    “It’s all so much
    What we have always wanted, I confess
    It’s seeming bad for a moment makes it seem
    Even worse still, and so on down, down, down.
    It’s nothing; it’s their leaving us at dusk.
    I never bore it well when people went.
    The first night after guests have gone, the house
    Seems haunted or exposed. I always take
    A personal interest in the locking up
    At bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off.”
    He fetched a dingy lantern from behind
    A door. “There’s that we didn’t lose! And these!”—
    Some matches he unpocketed. “For food—
    The meals we’ve had no one can take from us.
    I wish that everything on earth were just
    As certain as the meals we’ve had. I wish
    The meals we haven’t had were, anyway.
    What have you you know where to lay your hands on?”
     
    “The bread we bought in passing at the store.
    There’s butter somewhere, too.”
     
    “Let’s rend the bread.
    I’ll light the fire for company for you;
    You’ll not have any other company
    Till Ed begins to get out on a Sunday
    To look us over and give us his idea
    Of what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up.
    He’ll know what he would do if he were we,
    And all at once. He’ll plan for us and plan
    To help us, but he’ll take it out in planning.
    Well, you can set the table with the loaf.
    Let’s see you find your loaf. I’ll light the fire.
    I like chairs occupying other chairs
    Not offering a lady—”
     
    “There again, Joe!
    You’re tired .”
     
    “I’m drunk-nonsensical tired out;
    Don’t mind a word I say. It’s a day’s work
    To empty one house of all household goods
    And fill another with ’em fifteen miles away,
    Although you do no more than dump them down.”
     
    “Dumped down in paradise we are and happy.”
     
    “It’s all so much what I have always wanted,
    I can’t believe it’s what you wanted, too.”
     
    “Shouldn’t you like to know?”
     
    “I’d like to know
    If it is what you wanted, then how much
    You wanted it for me.”
     
    “A troubled conscience!
    You don’t want me to tell if I don’t know.”
     
    “I don’t want to find out what can’t be known.
    But who first said the word to come?”
     
    “My dear,
    It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe,
    For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings.
    Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.
    There are only middles.”
     
    “What is this?”
     
    “This life?
    Our sitting here by lantern-light together
    Amid the wreckage of a former home?
    You won’t deny the lantern isn’t new.
    The stove is not, and you are not to me,
    Nor I to you.”
     
    “Perhaps you never were?”
     
    “It would take me forever to recite
    All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.
    New is a word for fools in towns who think
    Style upon style in dress and thought at last
    Must get somewhere. I’ve heard you say as much.
    No, this is no beginning.”
     
    “Then an end?”
     
    “End is a gloomy