New Hampshire quotes

He didn’t even offer me a drink Until I asked for one to steady him. This is called having an idea to sell.

It never could have happened in New Hampshire.

The only person really soiled with trade I ever stumbled on in old New Hampshire Was someone who had just come back ashamed From selling things in California.

How did he get so? (Rich was understood.) In dealing in “old rags” in San Francisco. Oh it was terrible as well could be. We both of us turned over in our graves.

Just specimens is all New Hampshire has,

One each of everything as in a show-case Which naturally she doesn’t care to sell.

Do you know, Considering the market, there are more Poems produced than any other thing? No wonder poets sometimes have to seem So much more business-like than business men.

Their wares are so much harder to get rid of.

She’s one of the two best states in the Union. Vermont’s the other. And the two have been Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke from of old In many Marches.

Easton goes Democratic, Wilson 4 Hughes 2. And everybody to the saddest Laughed the loud laugh, the big laugh at the little.

New York (five million) laughs at Manchester,

Manchester (sixty or seventy thousand) laughs At Littleton (four thousand), Littleton Laughs at Franconia (seven hundred), and Franconia laughs, I fear—did laugh that night— At Easton. What has Easton left to laugh at, And like the actress exclaim, “Oh my God” at? There’s Bungey;

I’m what is called a sensibilitist, Or otherwise an environmentalist. I refuse to adapt myself a mite To any change from hot to cold, from wet To dry, from poor to rich, or back again.

I make a virtue of my suffering

From nearly everything that goes on round me. In other words, I know wherever I am, Being the creature of literature I am, I shall not lack for pain to keep me awake. Kit Marlowe taught me how to say my prayers:

Even to say the groves were God’s first temples Comes too near to Ahaz’ sin for safety. Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred. But here is not a question of what’s sacred; Rather of what to face or run away from.

I’d hate to be a runaway from nature.

And neither would I choose to be a puke Who cares not what he does in company, And, when he can’t do anything, falls back On words, and tries his worst to make words speak Louder than actions, and sometimes achieves it.

“Come, but this isn’t choosing—puke or prude?” Well, if I have to choose one or the other, I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer With an income in cash of say a thousand (From say a publisher in New York City).

It’s restful to arrive at a decision, And restful just to think about New Hampshire. At present I am living in Vermont.

Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

It’s restful to arrive at a decision, And restful just to think about New Hampshire. At present I am living in Vermont.

Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Some laborer found one faded and stone cold, And saving that its weight suggested gold, And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

Let him say why it should not be declared so.”

The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.

It must be I want life to go on living.

Let him say why it should not be declared so.” The melancholy of having to count souls Where they grow fewer and fewer every year Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.

It must be I want life to go on living.

“You know Orion always comes up sideways.

But the first thing next morning we reflected If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with.

For to be social is to be forgiving.

Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us, We don’t cut off from coming to church suppers, But what we miss we go to him and ask for. He promptly gives it back, that is if still Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.

No matter that the meaning was not clear. A name with meaning could bring up a child, Taking the child out of the parents’ hands. Better a meaningless name, I should say, As leaving more to nature and happy chance.

Name children some names and see what you do.

I’ve known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted axe behind me. But that was in the woods, to hold my hand From striking at another alder’s roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch.

It wasn’t my not weighing anything So much as my not knowing anything— My brother had been nearer right before. I had not taken the first step in knowledge;

I had not learned to let go with the hands, As still I have not learned to with the heart,

And have no wish to with the heart—nor need, That I can see. The mind—is not the heart. I may yet live, as I know others live, To wish in vain to let go with the mind— Of cares, at night, to sleep;

I had not taken the first step in knowledge; I had not learned to let go with the hands, As still I have not learned to with the heart, And have no wish to with the heart—nor need, That I can see.

The mind⁠—is not the heart.

I may yet live, as I know others live, To wish in vain to let go with the mind— Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me That I need learn to let go with the heart.

He said the dead had souls, but when I asked him How could that be—I thought the dead were souls, He broke my trance. Don’t that make you suspicious That there’s something the dead are keeping back?

Yes, there’s something the dead are keeping back.

Son. You wouldn’t want to tell him what we have Up attic, mother?

They’ve got it settled wrong, and I can prove it. Flattered I must be to have two towns fighting To make a present of me to each other. They don’t dispose me, either one of them, To spare them any trouble.

Double trouble’s Always the witch’s motto anyway.

I’ll double theirs for both of them—you watch me. They’ll find they’ve got the whole thing to do over, That is, if facts is what they want to go by. They set a lot (now don’t they?)

I made him do it for me in the dark. And he liked everything I made him do. I hope if he is where he sees me now He’s so far off he can’t see what I’ve come to.

You can come down from everything to nothing.

All is, if I’d a-known when I was young And full of it, that this would be the end, It doesn’t seem as if I’d had the courage To make so free and kick up in folks’ faces.

It’s to say, “You and I” To such a ghost, “You and I Off here With the dead race of the Great Auk!” And, “

Better defeat almost, If seen clear, Than life’s victories of doubt That need endless talk talk To make them out.

”

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)— Though some savants make earth include the sky; And blue so far above us comes so high, It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never any more the dead.

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

I slumbered with your poems on my breast Spread open as I dropped them half-read through Like dove wings on a figure on a tomb To see, if in a dream they brought of you,

How over, though, for even me who knew The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine, If I was not to speak of it to you And see you pleased once more with words of mine?

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall, We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?” A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall, The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head And snorted at us.

Before man came to blow it right The wind once blew itself untaught, And did its loudest day and night In any rough place where it caught.

Man came to tell it what was wrong: It hadn’t found the place to blow; It blew too hard⁠—the aim was song.

And listen—how it ought to go!

He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs Always wrong to the light, so never seeing Deeper down in the well than where the water Gives me back in a shining surface picture Me myself in the summer heaven godlike Looking out of a wreath …

I craved strong sweets, but those Seemed strong when I was young; The petal of the rose It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt That is not dashed with pain

And weariness and fault; I crave the stain

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.

Love and forgetting might have carried them A little further up the mountain side With night so near, but not much further up.

The same Grim giving to do over for them both. She dared no more than ask him with her eyes How was it with him for a second trial. And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.

They had given him back to her, but not to keep.

The farm house lingers, though averse to square With the new city street it has to wear A number in. But what about the brook That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

Next to nothing for use.

But a crop is a crop, And who’s to say where The harvest shall stop?

The sound of the closing outside door was all. You made no sound in the grass with your footfall, As far as you went from the door, which was not far;

To think to know the country and not know The hillside on the day the sun lets go

Ten million silver lizards out of snow!

As often as I’ve seen it done before I can’t pretend to tell the way it’s done. It looks as if some magic of the sun Lifted the rug that bred them on the floor And the light breaking on them made them run.