Transcript Emily101

Robert Frost
一年仁班 39號 蔡宛妤
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Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in
1874. He moved to New England at the age of
eleven and became interested in reading and
writing poetry during his high school years in
Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at
Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard,
but never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted
through a string of occupations after leaving
school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor
of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional
poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November
8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The
Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who
became a major inspiration in his poetry until her
death in 1938. The couple moved to England in
1912,
• after their New Hampshire farm failed, and it was
abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such
contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas,
Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in
England, Frost also established a friendship with
the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and
publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the
United States in 1915, he had published two fulllength collections, A Boy's Will and North of
Boston, and his reputation was established. By the
nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated
poet in America, and with each new book—
including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range
(1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing
(1962)—his fame and honors (including four
Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
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Though his work is principally associated with
the life and landscape of New England, and though
he was a poet of traditional verse forms and
metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the
poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is
anything but a merely regional or minor poet. The
author of searching and often dark meditations on
universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern
poet in his adherence to language as it is actually
spoken, in the psychological complexity of his
portraits, and in the degree to which his work is
infused with layers of ambiguity and irony. Robert
Frost lived and taught for many years in
Massachusetts and Vermont, and died on January
29, 1963, in Boston.
This bio was last updated on Apr 4, 2002.
Bibliography
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Brower, Reuben A., The Poetry of Robert Frost (1963)
Brunshaw, Stanley, Robert Frost Himself (1986)
Clymer, W. B. S., Robert Frost: A Bibliography (1972)
Egmond, Peter Van, The Critical Reception of Robert Frost:
An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Comment (1974)
Frost, Robert, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected
Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. by Edward Connery
Lathem (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1969)
-----, Selected Letters, ed. by Lawrance Thompson (1964)
-----, Selected Prose, ed. by Lathem and Hyde Cox (New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966)
-----, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays: Complete Poems
1949, In the Clearing, Uncollected Poems, Plays, Lectures,
Essays, Stories, and Letters (The Library of America, 1995)
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Gerber, Philip L., Robert Frost (1966)
-----, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Frost (1982)
Hall, D., Robert Frost: Contours of Belief (1980)
Katz, S.L., Elinor Frost (1988)
Lathem, E.C., ed., Robert Frost's Poetry and Prose (1984)
Lentricchia, Frank, and Lentricchia, Melissa Christian,
Robert Frost: A Bibliography, 1913-1974 (1976)
Marcus, Mordecai, The Poems of Robert Frost: An
Explication (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991)
Poirier, Richard, Robert Frost (1977)
Potter, James L., Robert Frost Handbook (1980)
Pritchard, William H., Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered
(1984)
Thompson, Lawrance, Robert Frost, 3 vols. (1966-76)
Thompson, L., and Winnick, R.H., Robert Frost: A
Biography, ed. by E.C. Lathem (1981)
Walsh, John Evangelist, Into My Own: The English Years of
Robert Frost, 1912-1915 (1988)
Poems By Robert Frost
• ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT
• BIRCHES
• MENDING WALL
• OUT OUT
• THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
• STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY
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EVENING
THE RUNAWAY
TWO LOOK AT TWO
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT
• I have been one acquainted with the night.
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I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
O luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
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BIRCHES
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows-Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. back
MENDING WALL
• Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
• 'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say '.Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
• Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
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OUT OUT
• The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside them in her apron
To tell them 'Supper'. At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap-He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh.
• As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all-Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart-He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then -- the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little -- less -- nothing! -- and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
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THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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STOPPING BY WOODS ON A
SNOWY EVENING
• Whose woods these are I think I know.
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His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
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THE RUNAWAY
• Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, "Sakes,
It's only weather". He'd think she didn't know !
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
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When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'
TWO LOOK AT TWO
• Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
• Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
'This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?'
But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait.
A buck from round the spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall as near the wall as they.
This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril,
Not the same doe come back into her place.
He viewed them quizzically with jerks of head,
As if to ask, 'Why don't you make some motion?
Or give some sign of life? Because you can't.
I doubt if you're as living as you look."
Thus till he had them almost feeling dared
To stretch a proffering hand -- and a spell-breaking.
Then he too passed unscared along the wall.
• Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from.
'This must be all.' It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favour
Had made them certain earth returned their love.
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