A Star in a Stone-boat

by Robert Frost    (For Lincoln MacVeagh)

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,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.

He was not used to handling stars thrown dark

And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal

The one thing palpable besides the soul

To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing

It brooded ant-eggs, and had one large wing,

One not so large for flying in a ring,

And a long Bird of Paradise's tail,

(Though these when not in use to fly and trail

It drew back in its body like a snail);

Nor know that he might move it from the spot

The harm was done; from having been star-shot

The very nature of the soil was hot

And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,

Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain

Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,

He loaded an old stone-boat with the star

And not, as you might think, a flying car,

Such as even poets would admit perforce

More practical than Pegasus the horse

If it could put a star back in its course.

He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a pace

But faintly reminiscent of the race

Of jostling rock in interstellar space.

It went for building stone, and I, as though

Commanded in a dream, forever go

To right the wrong that this should have been so.

Yet ask where else it could have gone as well,

I do not know — I cannot stop to tell:

He might have left it lying where it fell.

From following walls I never lift my eye

Except at night to places in the sky

Where showers of charted meteors let fly.

Some may know what they seek in school and church,

And why they seek it there; for what I search

I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch;

Sure that though not a star of death and birth,

So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth

To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth,

Though not, I say, a star of death and sin,

It yet has poles, and only needs a spin

To show its worldly nature and begin

To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm

And run off in strange tangents with my arm

As fish do with the line in first alarm.

Such as it is, it promises the prize

Of the one world complete in any size

That I am like to compass, fool or wise.