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Robert Frost
Sea waves are green and wet,
But up from where they die,
Rise others vaster yet,
And those are brown and dry.
They are the sea made land
To come at the fisher town,
And bury in solid sand
The men she could not drown.
She may know cove and cape,
But she does not know mankind
If by any change of shape,
She hopes to cut off mind.
Men left her a ship to sink:
They can leave her a hut as well;
And be but more free to think
For the one more cast off shell.
The town is still asleep.
The sky is pale with quickening light.
Quenched, the long night of stars
Swirls under the earth, but one,
That silver planet, Venus, holds
Over the ice-haired lawns
A vernal promise: that love is not lost.
Walk through the streets
With birds and the clatter-clack
Of streetlights as they change,
A little tremble as the chill of night
Dies in a sunburst from the trees,
A vacant house whose owner dies,
A fallen elm, an abscess in the line
Of shops, a broken pane. I hold
My book which is all I may carry away,
all alone I am them
to see and sit
with a town
doing much in me
noon banished
to a lost town
every street ready
to be stairs
in a town
run-down with drink
ashing the ice
where a flock
has troubled the fields
I drink alone
glad to see the town
way in the distance
is night the same
ever since we were in town
that wrought our time
in one drop
into a different
make of bed
I am a stranger to the committee
against anything distasteful
an old hat left to lie
at the end of town
I believe in doubt
and seek to be content
telling me about
the bear that came to town
my old barber
the old monstrous god
of bodkin and thimble
broke open till all was out
I saw no paper question it
as silver as music
the water here
we find the town beside the fort
a contingency unsettled in sand
news here in Cuba signifies little
but to say that something comes
I came to town
to blot out the hours
though it did not seem so good
as at first
the bottle is a woman
I hope may let me be
town is a hole I stepped in
with my voice full of hard use
jostled and crowded
fallen I get up again
I will live sparingly