This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call
I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
"How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below."
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an axe—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
Notes
Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.
Form:
couplets, triples, quadtuples.
2.And cold: And the cold (Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose,
& and Plays (Library of America, 1995), p. 210).
nourished: nurtured (Library of America edn.)
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Comments
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My view on this poem is of a father sheltering his son. But it could possibly be Robert Frost refering to when he left the farm he owned for many years, and moved to England with his family.
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wow, this is such a sad poem that can be read on different levels. I really enjoyed reading this and will come back to it again.
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