Sheehy, Donald. Poems, Life, Legacy. (CD-ROM) New York: Henry Holt, 1997.

Tuten, Nancy, and John Zubizarreta, eds. The Robert Frost Encylopedia. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912—1915. New York: Grove Press, 1988.

Wilcox, Earl, ed. Robert Frost: His Incalculable Influence on Others. Victoria: University of Victoria, 1994.

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

The texts presented here are those of the first editions of A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, and Mountain Interval. The texts of the poems Frost later included in New Hampshire follow their first printings.

A BOY’S WILL

A BOY’S WILL1

TO
E. M. F.

INTO MY OWN

INTO MY OWN

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ‘twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.2

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

GHOST HOUSE

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.

MY NOVEMBER GUEST

MY NOVEMBER GUEST

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.