My Man Robert Frost

To continue in highlighting National Poetry Month I thought I would share a couple of Robert Frost's poems. I think most of us are familiar with the first one (but it's just so good I couldn't help reprinting it) and the second is one I remember my father reciting to me. I think I was studying Frost at the time when he recited "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" from memory and told me how he had had to memorize it as a student some years before.

I think I remember the moment so well because my father is a man of numbers and logic - a computer programmer, an engineer, a student who associates the song "Take it to the Limit" by the Eagles with a calculus class he once took (all right, and maybe a girl, too, but he never admitted that part); he was the kid who earned his FCC license so he could use the radio he built himself - and to listen to him recite poetry, spontaneously, is just something I may never forget.

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

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 I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
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.

I realize that Frost wrote so many other poems (among them "Birches" which I love) and these are probably two of the most obvious choices. But I figured why go out of my way looking for beauty when it's already in the forefront of my mind :)