Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, LANGUAGE, by FRANCES MARY FROST


Poetry Explorer

Classic and Contemporary Poetry

LANGUAGE, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: This is a country of little rivers
Last Line: Inarticulate heart.
Subject(s): Language; Words; Vocabulary


This is a country of little rivers—
Dog river, Mississquoi, Otter Creek—
Slicing villages with gold at sunrise,
Looping them with silver on yellow afternoons,
Putting them to sleep with cloud-purple and mountain-purple at dusk.
This is a country of small rivers running north and west—
Winooski, Lamoille, Ottauquechee;
And the Connecticut going south and keeping the maples of Vermont
From burning with the maples of New Hampshire.
Apple trees on a slope say what a man cannot say
And ask questions a man cannot ask,
Knowing he will not be answered.
A grindstone under apple trees by a white house,
Old wagons under apple trees by a deserted barn,
A scythe hung in the low crotch of an apple tree east of a rocky hill—
These are the stunted speech of a country
Slow to live and equally slow to die.
Stone walls in the South,
Piled along hill-ridges and through the woods,
Stone walls up as far as Dorset and Chelsea.
Split-rail fences in the North,
Zigzagging between fields,
Running beside the roads.
Barbed-wire fences in the North, for pastures,
Barbed-wire for hay-fields and river-lots.
In the North we leave the stones where they grew ...
Wetly out of brook bottoms,
Jagged and dark out of the hills.
Stone walls, fences, rivers, apple trees—
These speak of a slow country,
Of white-spired villages between two hills
And the loves and hates and passions between two hills.
These talk of abandoned farms and abandoned lives
And of men who ask no questions of the earth,
Knowing earth will not answer.
Stone walls, rivers, fences, apple trees—
These are the language of a slow country,
The curious speech of a rock-bitten,
Inarticulate heart.





Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!


Other Poems of Interest...
Home: PoetryExplorer.net