Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Good-bye, and Keep Cold
1This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
2And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
3Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
4An orchard away at the end of the farm
5All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
6I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
7I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
8By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
9(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call
10I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
11And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
12I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
13(We made it secure against being, I hope,
14By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
15No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
16But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
17"How often already you've had to be told,
18Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
19Dread fifty above more than fifty below."
20I have to be gone for a season or so.
21My business awhile is with different trees,
22Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
23And such as is done to their wood with an axe--
24Maples and birches and tamaracks.
25I wish I could promise to lie in the night
26And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
27When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
28Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
29But something has to be left to God.
Notes
2] And cold: And the cold (Robert Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & and Plays (Library of America, 1995), p. 210).
22] nourished: nurtured (Library of America edn.)
Online text copyright © 2009, Ian Lancashire (the Department of English) and the University of Toronto.
Published by the Web Development Group, Information Technology Services, University of Toronto Libraries.
Original text: Robert Frost, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1923), pp. 93-94. D-11 0397 Fisher Library.
First publication date:
1923
RPO poem editor: Ian Lancashire
RP edition: RPO 1998.
Recent editing: 2:2002/1/16
Form: couplets, triples, quadtuples
Other poems by Robert Frost
