Good-by and Keep Cold

The Barn, by CaptPiper, on Flickr, Creative Commons Licensed

Good-by and Keep Cold
by Robert Frost

(From Harper’s Magazine, July 1920)


THIS saying good-by 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-by 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 ax—
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.



I am not an orchard. I am MORE THAN READY for fifty above. Bring it on, Spring, bring it on.

You can buy a $.99 mp3 file of Lesley Frost reading this poem. Lesley Frost was the second child of Robert and Elinor Frost.

The Poetry Friday Roundup is hosted this week by Carol at Rasco from RIF.

Poetry Friday--BRRRRrrrrrr!

Walking the dog in the pre-dawn below-zero windchill the last few weeks, I've felt a bit like Sam McGee in The Cremation of Sam McGee (by Robert Service):

Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;

And like Sam, there are some mornings (like today) when I think I won't warm up unless I crawl right into the furnace. This is what the speaker in the poem witnesses when he finally has the nerve to see how it's going with Sam's cremation:

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked;" ... then the door I opened wide.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear you'll let in the cold and storm-
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

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Links:
Robert Service reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee
Johnny Cash reciting The Cremation of Sam McGee
Spooky reading on YouTube