170 quotes
Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee
And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me.
In the Clearing (1962)
Happiness Makes Up In Height For What It Lacks In Length
A Witness Tree (1942)
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
New Hampshire (1923)
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease.
A Witness Tree (1942)
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
A Boy's Will (1913)
I am assured at any rate
Man's practically inexterminate.
Someday I must go into that.
There's always been an Ararat
Where someone someone else begat
To start the world all over at.
In the Clearing (1962)
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future´s sakes.
A Further Range (1936)
If, as they say, some dust thrown in my eyes
Will keep my talk from getting overwise,
I'm not the one for putting off the proof.
Let it be overwhelming, off a roof
And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust,
And blind me to a standstill if it must.
West-Running Brook (1928)
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
Mountain Interval (1916)
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.
Mountain Interval (1916)
'My words are nearly always an offense.
I don't know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can't say I see how.'
North of Boston (1914)
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
A Further Range (1936)
'Twas Age imposed on poems
Their gather-roses burden
To warn against the danger
That overtaken lovers
From being overflooded
With happiness should have it
And yet not know they have it.
A Witness Tree (1942)
What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
New Hampshire (1923)
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
A Witness Tree (1942)
Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
New Hampshire (1923)
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
West-Running Brook (1928)
It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you — and you with me —
Because we're — we're — I don't know
What we are.
West-Running Brook (1928)
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long. — You come too.
North of Boston (1914)
Have I not walked without an upward look
Of caution under stars that very well
Might not have missed me when they shot and fell?
It was a risk I had to take — and took.
Steeple Bush (1947)