The Star-splitter | |
by Robert Frost | |
YOU know Orion always comes up sideways. | |
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, | |
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me | |
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something | |
5 |
I should have done by daylight, and indeed, |
After the ground is frozen, I should have done | |
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful | |
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney | |
To make fun of my way of doing things, | |
10 |
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me. |
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights | |
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?" | |
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk | |
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, | |
15 |
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming, |
He burned his house down for the fire insurance | |
And spent the proceeds on a telescope | |
To satisfy a life-long curiosity | |
About our place among the infinities. | |
20 |
"What do you want with one of those blame things?" |
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!" | |
"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything | |
More blameless in the sense of being less | |
A weapon in our human fight," he said. | |
25 |
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it." |
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground | |
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move | |
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years | |
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling, | |
30 |
He burned his house down for the fire insurance |
And bought the telescope with what it came to. | |
He had been heard to say by several: | |
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see; | |
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's | |
35 |
A telescope. Someone in every town |
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one. | |
In Littleton it may as well be me." | |
After such loose talk it was no surprise | |
When he did what he did and burned his house down. | |
40 |
Mean laughter went about the town that day |
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on, | |
And he could wait — we'd see to him to-morrow. | |
But the first thing next morning we reflected | |
If one by one we counted people out | |
45 |
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, | |
50 |
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. | |
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad | |
About his telescope. Beyond the age | |
55 |
Of being given one's gift for Christmas, |
He had to take the best way he knew how | |
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was | |
He took a strange thing to be roguish over. | |
Some sympathy was wasted on the house, | |
60 |
A good old-timer dating back along; |
But a house isn't sentient; the house | |
Didn't feel anything. And if it did, | |
Why not regard it as a sacrifice, | |
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, | |
65 |
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction? |
Out of a house and so out of a farm | |
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn | |
To earn a living on the Concord railroad, | |
As under-ticket-agent at a station | |
70 |
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets, |
Was setting out up track and down, not plants | |
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars | |
That varied in their hue from red to green. | |
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. | |
75 |
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing. |
Often he bid me come and have a look | |
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, | |
At a star quaking in the other end. | |
I recollect a night of broken clouds | |
80 |
And underfoot snow melted down to ice, |
And melting further in the wind to mud. | |
Bradford and I had out the telescope. | |
We spread our two legs as we spread its three, | |
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, | |
85 |
And standing at our leisure till the day broke, |
Said some of the best things we ever said. 1 | |
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter, | |
Because it didn't do a thing but split | |
A star in two or three the way you split | |
90 |
A globule of quicksilver in your hand |
With one stroke of your finger in the middle. | |
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one | |
And ought to do some good if splitting stars | |
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. | |
95 |
We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? |
Do we know any better where we are, | |
And how it stands between the night to-night | |
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? | |
How different from the way it ever stood? |
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From the Perscribo.com online eBook: New Hampshire by Robert Frost BACK TO TOP |
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Transcribed and formatted for Internet reading, with addition of line numbers and edits to footnotes, from the 1923 (Henry Holt and Company) hardcover edition of New Hampshire by Robert Frost.