Art,
By Herman Melville

In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.

About the Poem

Herman Melville’s short but powerful poem Art distills into a few compact lines the contradictory forces at the heart of creation. It opens with a scene of calm:

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream

Of many a brave unbodied scheme.”

Here, Melville acknowledges what many of us know too well—ideas come easily in quiet moments. Our minds are full of “unbodied schemes,” bold plans and visions that exist only in imagination. But dreaming alone is not art. The difficulty lies in giving those dreams form, in pulling them out of the ether and shaping them into something tangible.

Melville describes this process as a marriage of opposites:

“A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence.”

Each pair of opposites illustrates the tension of creation. Art requires both the fire of inspiration and the cooling restraint of discipline. It requires patience to endure long labor, and bursts of joy to keep the work alive. An artist must balance humility before the task with pride in their own vision, instinct with study, raw emotion with critical judgment.

These contradictions are not obstacles—they are the materials. To create something of value, the artist must bring them together, “fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, / To wrestle with the angel—Art.”

That final biblical allusion is striking. In Genesis, Jacob wrestles through the night with an angel, demanding a blessing and emerging wounded but transformed. Melville suggests that to make art is a similar struggle: a contest with forces larger than oneself, leaving the artist changed, exhausted, and blessed with creation.

For Melville—better known for his sprawling novels like Moby-Dick—this poem is a confession of the artist’s burden. Creation is not a smooth act but a wrestling match, a fusion of contradictions, a labor of both agony and ecstasy.

I find this poem resonates deeply with the creative process in any form—whether writing, painting, composing, or even living an honest life. We all carry “brave unbodied schemes,” but only by engaging in the struggle, by wrestling with the angel, do we bring them into the world.

About the Poet

Herman Melville (1819–1891) is best remembered today as the author of Moby-Dick (1851), one of the towering works of American literature. Yet his career was far from smooth. His early sea novels brought him popularity, but his later, more ambitious works—Moby-Dick included—were commercial failures in his lifetime. Melville turned to poetry in his later years, publishing several volumes, including Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) and Timoleon (1891). His poetry often reveals the same themes as his prose: the struggle of humanity against vast forces, whether nature, fate, or, as in this poem, the act of creation itself.

Here is a bonus poem for the week. It was today’s Poem-a-Day from Poets.org.

Poem of September 24
By Samira Negrouche

translated from the French by the author

Who crosses into you when you cross

Who crosses when you don’t cross

Who doesn’t cross when you cross

Who crosses when you can’t cross

Who doesn’t cross when you don’t cross

Who doesn’t want to cross

Who thinks they’re crossing

Who doesn’t look at you while crossing

Who might take the time to look at you.

_____________________________________

Poème du 24 septembre

Qui traverse en toi quand tu traverses

Qui traverse quand tu ne traverses pas

Qui ne traverse pas quand tu traverses

Qui traverse quand tu ne peux pas traverser

Qui ne traverse pas quand tu ne traverses pas

Qui ne veut pas traverser

Qui croit traverser

Qui ne te regarde pas en traversant

Qui prendra peut-être le temps de te regarder.

About This Poem

“Written with eight other [poems], forming nine poems of nine lines, this poem is part of a public installation called Signs/Promises. It can be read as a geopolitical statement or as an intimate whisper to yourself or to someone else. It is an invitation to question and envision all the layers of displacement that are required to be able to cross a border—real or symbolic—to meet another. It reminds us how fragile the understanding of another reality can be and why we should keep remembering it, especially when we think we are aware.”—Samira Negrouche

About the Poet

Samira Negrouche is a writer, poet, and translator whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is the author of several collections of poetry, including Pente Raide [Steep Slope] (Actes Sud, 2025), cowritten with Marin Fouqué. Negrouche’s book Le Jazz de oliviers [The Olive Trees’ Jazz] (Pleiades Press, 2020), translated by Marilyn Hacker, was short-listed for the 2021 National Translation Award, as well as the Derek Walcott Prize that same year. A translator from Arabic and English to French, as well as a medical doctor, Negrouche lives in Algiers.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

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.

About the Poem

Robert Frost is one of those poets who can take just eight short lines and capture the weight of beauty, loss, and the passing of time. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is deceptively simple—something you might read once and think you’ve understood—but the more you sit with it, the more layers it reveals.

At its heart, the poem reminds us that nothing beautiful lasts forever. The first flush of spring, the gold of new leaves, the brilliance of dawn—all are fleeting. Frost connects this natural cycle to the story of Eden, suggesting that even the purest moments of perfection can’t be held onto. Time moves forward, and everything inevitably changes.

I think this poem resonates so strongly because we’ve all had moments we wish we could freeze. Whether it’s the joy of youth, the fire of first love, or even a golden autumn day in Vermont, those moments are precious precisely because they’re fleeting. Frost doesn’t just mourn that loss—he honors it. By recognizing impermanence, we’re reminded to hold on a little tighter, to notice the beauty while it’s here.

It’s no wonder that this poem has found its way into popular culture too—most famously in S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, where it becomes a message about innocence and holding on to what makes us shine before the world tries to wear it away.

For me, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” isn’t just about nature, or even about youth. It’s about the reminder that life itself is made of fleeting golden moments. We can’t keep them, but we can cherish them, and maybe that’s enough.

About the Poet

Robert Frost (1874–1963) is often remembered as one of America’s quintessential poets, though he spent nearly a decade in England before his work was first published. He returned to the U.S. just as his career was beginning to take off, and over the course of his life he became one of the most widely read and beloved poets of the 20th century.

Frost’s poetry is rooted in the landscapes and rhythms of rural New England. He wrote in plainspoken language, but beneath the simplicity lies a deep philosophical and emotional complexity. His poems often explore the tension between humanity and nature, the fleetingness of beauty, and the choices that shape our lives.

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, more than any other poet, and in 1961 he read at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. Despite his public persona as the homespun New England sage, Frost’s poetry frequently wrestles with darkness, loss, and impermanence—making “Nothing Gold Can Stay” a perfect example of his gift for distilling profound truth into the smallest of spaces.

For those of us in Vermont, Frost feels like a neighbor as well as a poet. He spent the last decades of his life here, teaching at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English and writing in the Green Mountains he loved so well. He is buried in Bennington, Vermont, not far from where visitors can still walk the landscapes that inspired so much of his verse.

Freedom and Truth
by Margaret Fuller

To a Friend.

The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend,
Freedom is but a means to gain an end.
Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine
Be consecrate to thought still more divine.
The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw
Is liberty to comprehend the law.
Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame,
Comprising means and end in Truth’s great name.

About the Poem

Margaret Fuller’s poem Freedom and Truth offers a meditation on what freedom really means. She insists that freedom is not an end in itself, but a means to something higher — to truth, to comprehension of moral law, to the divine. Freedom without truth, she suggests, is an empty shrine: a structure without a god inside. For her, true human happiness comes from using liberty not merely for self-indulgence, but to understand and live within universal truths.

Reading Fuller’s lines, I couldn’t help but think of the chorus of Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee” (made immortal by Janis Joplin):

“Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose…
And feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues.”

Though written more than a century later, these lyrics capture a strikingly similar tension. For Kristofferson and Joplin, freedom stripped of attachments is both exhilarating and hollow. It means release, but also loss. Like Fuller, the song suggests that freedom alone is not enough; its meaning is found when it leads to something more — in this case, authentic connection, soulful music, and the raw honesty of experience.

This resonates deeply with the American Transcendentalist movement, of which Fuller was a central voice. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, “For what avail the plough or sail, or land or life, if freedom fail?” — reminding us that liberty matters only in so far as it sustains deeper purposes. Henry David Thoreau sharpened the point in Walden: “Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.” Both Emerson and Thoreau, like Fuller, argued that freedom was valuable only when it brought us closer to truth, authenticity, and the divine.

And yet, we see in our own age how this lesson is often forgotten. Freedom of speech, one of the most cherished liberties, is frequently used as a cover for spreading hatred, division, and outright lies. But freedom of speech divorced from truth is no freedom at all — it becomes the empty shrine Fuller warned against, a hollow liberty that erodes rather than sustains the human spirit.

Fuller’s 19th-century vision, Kristofferson’s 20th-century lyric, and our 21st-century struggles meet on common ground. All remind us that freedom cannot be idolized on its own. Whether in the pursuit of higher laws, in the fleeting transcendence of music and love, or in defending speech that is rooted in truth and justice, freedom gains its true meaning only when it opens into truth.

May we never forget that freedom without truth is a shell. Truth gives freedom its soul.

About the Poet

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) was one of the great voices of the American Transcendentalist movement, though her life and legacy often stand in the shadow of Emerson and Thoreau. I’ve always been inspired by the Transcendentalists, but I find myself especially drawn to Fuller — not only her writings but also the way she lived her life, ahead of her time and unwilling to conform to society’s expectations.

Fuller was the first editor of The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal, and the author of Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), one of the earliest works of American feminism. In that book she declared, “Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.” That call to self-examination and truth resonates as much today as it did in her century. She also wrote, “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” For Fuller, freedom was always tied to growth, to becoming more fully human, more fully alive.

Her life took her far beyond Concord. I’ve long had a fascination with American expatriates of the 19th century, and Fuller became one herself. In 1846, she traveled to Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune. It was there that she found herself drawn into the currents of Italian nationalism — what would later grow into the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian unification.

Fuller fell in love with Giovanni Ossoli, a young Italian revolutionary, and bore his child. Their relationship had to be kept secret, both because of politics and because of society’s judgment. At one point she even entrusted her baby to the care of another family, only to find he was treated poorly — a decision that haunted her. Eventually, Fuller, Ossoli, and their child decided to leave Italy for America, carrying with them her manuscript history of the Roman Republic.

Tragically, they never reached American shores. In July 1850, their ship struck a storm and sank off Fire Island, just short of New York Harbor. Fuller, her husband, and her child all drowned.

The Dreams of the Dreamer
By Georgia Douglas Johnson

The dreams of the dreamer
Are life-drops that pass
The break in the heart
To the soul’s hour-glass.

The songs of the singer
Are tones that repeat
The cry of the heart
‘Till it ceases to beat

About the Poem

Georgia Douglas Johnson’s The Dreams of the Dreamer is a brief but piercing meditation on the power and fragility of artistic expression. The poem likens dreams to “life-drops” trickling through “the soul’s hour-glass,” evoking both the preciousness of our inner visions and the inevitability of time’s passing. Songs, meanwhile, are cast as echoes of the heart’s cry—repetitions of human longing that endure until life itself is spent. The economy of Johnson’s language underscores the intensity of her theme: art is not incidental, but essential, even when born out of sorrow.

Johnson begins with the figure of the “dreamer.” Dreams, she says, are like “life-drops”—fragile and fleeting, but essential, like water to the body. These dreams fall through “the soul’s hour-glass,” suggesting both the inevitability of time and the slow draining away of what sustains us. Dreams here are not idle fantasies, but pieces of the self—hopes and desires that slip away as the heart breaks.

In the second stanza, Johnson turns to the “singer.” The singer’s art is not mere entertainment but a repetition of the heart’s cry. Music is presented as a translation of sorrow, carried outward in tones until the very last beat of life. Just as dreams are vital but fragile, songs are beautiful but born of pain.

Read in the context of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem reflects how art and creativity served as lifelines in the face of systemic racism and social limitation. Dreams and songs became vessels through which Black artists preserved dignity and expressed pain, hope, and resilience. Johnson, like her contemporaries, understood that creativity was both survival and resistance.

At the same time, the poem resonates deeply with the experience of many LGBTQ+ people. For generations, queer lives have been marked by hidden dreams and muted songs—hopes often confined by the fear of rejection or the demands of conformity. The imagery of “life-drops” slipping away through the heart’s breaks speaks to the quiet toll of living unseen or unaccepted, while the idea of the singer repeating the heart’s cry “’till it ceases to beat” captures how art has so often been the only place queer voices could safely exist. For LGBTQ+ readers, Johnson’s words may echo the endurance of self-expression in the face of silence, shame, or erasure. The poem’s beauty lies in its universality: it honors both the dreamer and the singer as figures whose inner truths cannot be contained, even when the world would rather they be quiet.

About the Poet

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966) was one of the most important Black female voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Though she lived much of her life in Washington, D.C., her poetry and plays brought her into the circle of leading Renaissance figures such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Johnson published four volumes of poetry and numerous plays, many of which grappled with themes of racial injustice, gender roles, and the inner struggles of Black life in America. Her home became a meeting place for writers, activists, and intellectuals, known as the “S Street Salon.” Despite the obstacles she faced as a woman and as an African American, Johnson’s poetry endures for its lyrical precision and emotional honesty, capturing the complex textures of longing, loss, and resilience.

Postscript: I have a lot of pictures of men in beds saved—some waiting in anticipation, some just waking up, some lying there wide-eyed, some alone, some with a partner. But none of them really felt like a dreamer. This one did. Something about the way he holds the bed linens, the calm on his face, the way he’s settled in—it just spoke of dreaming. Maybe you see that too, maybe you don’t. I could have picked someone daydreaming, but I kept coming back to this. Because while daydreams let us play with ideas, it’s in sleep that the truest longings surface, when our minds stop steering and let the dreams simply be. And maybe those are the real dreams of a dreamer.

Palm Springs
By Christian Gullette

We drink Fernet by ironic sculptures
under misters that make our bangs damp.

It’s our anniversary,
though that time feels faint.

We are searching for a place
to escape his diagnosis,

laws against gay marriage,
our leaky, flat roof.

Every Memorial Day
and Labor Day, we go to the desert.

Sometimes also the Fourth
of July.

Palm Springs rewinds things.
We almost buy that mid-century chair

proud of our rule that love for it
needs to be immediate.

At the Parker, a guy with a calf tattoo
brings drinks.

You can ask for anything here.
We toast to another year without cancer.

After dinner, we wander the hotel hedge maze,
nowhere to go that late but home.

About the Poem

Christian Gullette’s Palm Springs is a poem of sleek surfaces and simmering tensions. The desert resort town—so often painted in mid-century glamour—becomes here a backdrop for longing, performance, and queer recognition. Palm Springs is both mirage and mirror: a place where artifice and authenticity blur, where the hot light reveals as much as it conceals.

The poem doesn’t settle for nostalgia or kitsch. Instead, it examines what it means to inhabit a space so layered with history, expectation, and desire. Gullette’s Palm Springs isn’t just a sunny escape; it’s a charged landscape where intimacy pulses against the façade of cocktails, poolsides, and desert views.

Queer poets have long re-imagined spaces marked by leisure or luxury as sites of deeper reflection, and Gullette does just that. Palm Springs is lush but not naïve, glamorous but not shallow. It suggests that behind every stylish lounge chair or glimmering pool, there’s a body hoping to be seen, a self negotiating the terms of love and exposure.

As readers, we are left with a sense of recognition—of what it means to find ourselves in a place where beauty and fragility intertwine, where queer desire is both illuminated and complicated by the desert sun.

About the Poet

Christian Gullette is an acclaimed poet and translator based in San Francisco. His debut collection, Coachella Elegy (Trio House Press, 2024), earned critical praise and became a finalist for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. The volume has also been featured on several “must‑read” lists from LitHub, Electric Lit, Alta Journal, and Debutiful. Ron Charles of The Washington Post Book Club lauded its “cool, elegantly controlled poems,” while Publishers Weekly described it as “tender and deliciously sly.”

Gullette holds a Ph.D. in Scandinavian Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley, where he explored themes of sexuality, race, and neoliberalism in Swedish literature and film. He also earned an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and an M.Ed. from George Washington University, following a B.A. in English from Bates College. As a translator, he works professionally with Swedish texts—including poetry by Kristofer Folkhammar and Jonas Modig, as well as cookbooks by Roy Fares, Lisa Lemke, and others.

He currently serves as editor-in-chief of The Cortland Review and has taught workshops for the Kenyon Review Online Writers Workshops and the Poetry Society of New York. He was awarded a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship in 2022.

A longtime resident of San Francisco, Gullette lives with his husband, Michael. His work intricately interweaves personal grief—including living through his husband’s ocular cancer diagnosis and the loss of his brother—with the luminous terrain of California’s desert landscapes, exploring themes of desire, mortality, visibility, and renewal.

I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married
By Aaron Smith

to a man who’s dating a man who’s
married to a woman. The husband

of the man I’m dating knows he’s
dating me and my boyfriend knows his

husband is dating the man who’s
married to the woman who does not

know her husband is gay. The guy
she’s married to—the boyfriend

of my boyfriend’s husband—just told
his mom he’s gay and she’s happy

because she never liked his wife
which is kind of funny but mostly

sad and I feel sad that her husband
who’s dating a man is also a man

with a mother who has never liked her.
I tell my boyfriend to tell his husband

to tell his boyfriend that he needs
to tell his wife sooner rather than later

and I know he knows that but still it needs
to be said. My boyfriend said his husband

said his boyfriend plans to tell his wife
Memorial Day weekend when his grown

kids are home from college and everyone,
I imagine, is eating potato salad by the pool.

She works at a flower shop two towns
over. I want to go there when she’s not

there and buy her flowers, leave a note
with her coworker at the counter:

You deserve happiness, Natalie.
You deserve love.

Love,

Your husband’s boyfriend’s
husband’s boyfriend.

About the Poem

Aaron Smith’s poem “I’m Dating a Man Who’s Married” is a witty, layered, and poignant exploration of queer relationships, secrecy, and the tangled webs of love and obligation. At first glance, it reads like a piece of small-town gossip, the kind of convoluted story that grows more confusing the more one tries to explain it. Smith himself admits he “wanted this poem to seem like gossip and to sound convoluted in the way these scenarios sound when we try to convey them.” And indeed, the poem succeeds—its sentences loop and overlap, names vanish into pronouns, and each relationship branches into another until the reader feels caught in the same dizzying spiral as the speaker.

The poem begins plainly enough: the speaker is dating a man who is married to a woman. But very quickly, the cast expands—his boyfriend has a husband, that husband has a boyfriend, that boyfriend is still married to a woman, and on it goes. Each turn introduces another complication, another layer of secrecy or disclosure. The humor lies in the almost absurd wordplay of “my boyfriend’s husband’s boyfriend’s wife,” a construction that captures both the awkwardness of explaining queer love in heteronormative contexts and the entangled reality of lives lived in partial closets.

But beneath the comic tangle is sadness. At the heart of this web is Natalie—the unsuspecting wife, working in a flower shop two towns over. Her husband is living a life she doesn’t fully know, and the speaker’s compassion for her emerges in the imagined gesture of leaving her a note:

Your husband’s boyfriend’s
husband’s boyfriend.

It is the poem’s emotional crux. For all the confusion and gossip, Smith doesn’t let us forget the human cost of secrecy, the pain of those excluded from the truth, and the longing for everyone involved to find honesty and love.

The ending drives this home. The planned revelation is postponed until a convenient holiday weekend, when the family gathers “eating potato salad by the pool.” The image is almost comically suburban, yet it underscores how deeply closeted lives are woven into everyday rituals. Queerness is here, already part of the family table, even if it hasn’t been named aloud.

Smith’s poem is, in its way, deeply queer—not only in subject matter but in form. It resists straight lines, tidy categories, or simple relationships. It embraces convolution, contradiction, and the messy truth that love doesn’t always fit the scripts we’re handed. It is funny, yes, but also sad, compassionate, and achingly real.

For LGBTQ+ readers, the poem may feel familiar: the half-truths, the awkward explanations, the struggle to claim love openly without hurting others along the way. And for straight readers, it may pull back the curtain on just how complex closeted relationships can be—not only for the queer person hiding but for everyone around them.

Smith reminds us that at the end of all this gossip, the heart of the matter is love—love withheld, love shared, love denied, love deserved. And that is a truth worth repeating, even if it takes a whole poem of tangled pronouns to get there.

About the Poet

Aaron Smith is the author of several poetry collections, including Blue on Blue Ground (2005), Appetite (2012), and The Book of Daniel (2019). His work often explores themes of queer identity, desire, humor, and vulnerability, blending candor with a sharp, conversational style. Smith has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and his poems have been widely published in literary journals. Known for his mix of wit and emotional honesty, Smith often examines the complications of gay life in America—balancing comedy, longing, and sharp social observation.

From A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Act 5, scene 1
By William Shakespeare

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to ‘scape the serpent’s tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

One of my favorite passages in all of Shakespeare comes at the very end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, spoken by the mischievous sprite Puck, also known as Robin Goodfellow. In this closing soliloquy, Puck breaks the fourth wall and addresses the audience directly, offering a whimsical apology and a gentle reminder that all the magical chaos of the play was nothing more than a dream:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended—
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.

These lines invite the audience to consider the events of the play as a kind of dream state, a fantastical interlude where love and identity swirl in a moonlit wood, governed by fairies and folly. Puck—Shakespeare’s impish trickster—has spent the play both delighting in and accidentally disturbing the lives of mortals. Here, he offers a lighthearted reparation: if any of the night’s enchantments have unsettled the audience, they can simply imagine it all as a dream, and let go of any offense.

As a character, Puck embodies the spirit of mischief and transformation. He is Oberon’s jester and servant, the orchestrator of magical mishaps, and a symbol of the play’s themes of illusion, play, and unpredictability. Yet in this final moment, he becomes almost like a stage manager or storyteller, drawing the curtain on the night’s performance. The poem’s gentle rhymes and soft cadence give it a lullaby quality, reinforcing the idea that what we’ve witnessed was a fleeting vision.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

With this closing couplet, Puck asks the audience for applause—literal hands—and pledges to make things right again, as if promising that art, like dreams, can enchant but also restore. As a poem, it stands beautifully on its own, a meditation on the power of storytelling to both dazzle and heal, to stir the heart and then gently release it back into the waking world.

About the Author

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. He wrote 39 plays, 154 sonnets, and numerous poems, leaving behind a literary legacy that continues to influence storytelling, language, and performance. From comedies and tragedies to histories and romances, his work explores the full range of human experience with wit, beauty, and insight.

The Mountain
By Robert Frost

The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
And yet between the town and it I found,
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields.
The river at the time was fallen away,
And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.
I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
And there I met a man who moved so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no hand to stop him altogether.
“What town is this?” I asked.
“This? Lunenburg.”
Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
But only felt at night its shadowy presence.
“Where is your village? Very far from here?”
“There is no village—only scattered farms.
We were but sixty voters last election.
We can’t in nature grow to many more:
That thing takes all the room!” He moved his goad.
The mountain stood there to be pointed at.
Pasture ran up the side a little way,
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks:
After that only tops of trees, and cliffs
Imperfectly concealed among the leaves.
A dry ravine emerged from under boughs
Into the pasture.
“That looks like a path.
Is that the way to reach the top from here?—
Not for this morning, but some other time:
I must be getting back to breakfast now.”
“I don’t advise your trying from this side.
There is no proper path, but those that have
Been up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd’s.
That’s five miles back. You can’t mistake the place:
They logged it there last winter some way up.
I’d take you, but I’m bound the other way.”
“You’ve never climbed it?”
“I’ve been on the sides
Deer-hunting and trout-fishing. There’s a brook
That starts up on it somewhere—I’ve heard say
Right on the top, tip-top—a curious thing.
But what would interest you about the brook,
It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.
One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox’s breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles—
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!”
“There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain—if it isn’t wooded
Clear to the top.” I saw through leafy screens
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow,
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up—
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;
Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow.
“As to that I can’t say. But there’s the spring,
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.
That ought to be worth seeing.”
“If it’s there.
You never saw it?”
“I guess there’s no doubt
About its being there. I never saw it.
It may not be right on the very top:
It wouldn’t have to be a long way down
To have some head of water from above,
And a good distance down might not be noticed
By anyone who’d come a long way up.
One time I asked a fellow climbing it
To look and tell me later how it was.”
“What did he say?”
“He said there was a lake
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.”
“But a lake’s different. What about the spring?”
“He never got up high enough to see.
That’s why I don’t advise your trying this side.
He tried this side. I’ve always meant to go
And look myself, but you know how it is:
It doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain
You’ve worked around the foot of all your life.
What would I do? Go in my overalls,
With a big stick, the same as when the cows
Haven’t come down to the bars at milking time?
Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
‘Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it.”
“I shouldn’t climb it if I didn’t want to—
Not for the sake of climbing. What’s its name?”
“We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right.”
“Can one walk around it? Would it be too far?”
“You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,
But it’s as much as ever you can do,
The boundary lines keep in so close to it.
Hor is the township, and the township’s Hor—
And a few houses sprinkled round the foot,
Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
Rolled out a little farther than the rest.”
“Warm in December, cold in June, you say?”
“I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it’s warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.”
“You’ve lived here all your life?”
“Ever since Hor
Was no bigger than a—” What, I did not hear.
He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.

About the Poem

Since I had the chance to visit Lake Willoughby this past weekend, I thought it would be fitting to look at one of Robert Frost’s lesser-known but evocative poems, The Mountain. The poem mentions Mount Hor — one of the two dramatic mountains that rise on either side of Lake Willoughby in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Having seen the lake and the mountains in person now, I feel even more connected to the scene Frost describes.

Frost’s speaker begins by describing the imposing presence of the mountain over the town, how it casts a shadow and seems to shelter him. There’s awe in the way the mountain “holds” the town — almost like a guardian — yet it also looms, cutting out stars from view. When the speaker climbs the mountain in search of its supposed secret, he discovers that the mountain doesn’t really do anything except stand there. There is no magical spring at its summit, no hidden source of the river — water comes from elsewhere.

This poem has always struck me as a quiet meditation on human expectations versus reality. We often assume that something as grand as a mountain must contain secrets or power. But the truth is simpler — the mountain’s presence itself is its gift. It doesn’t need to justify its existence with hidden springs or mystical origins.

Standing along the shores of Lake Willoughby, looking up at Mount Hor and its neighbor Mount Pisgah rising sharply from the water’s edge, I thought of Frost’s insight: sometimes, beauty and meaning are not about what a place gives us, but about what it is.

Have you ever visited a place that made you feel that way — where its presence alone was enough?

About the Poet

Robert Frost (1874–1963) was one of America’s most celebrated poets, renowned for his depictions of rural life, his mastery of conversational language, and his profound observations on nature and human experience. Though he was born in California, Frost’s literary identity is deeply tied to New England, where he lived for much of his life.

Vermont, in particular, features prominently in his work. He lived for many years in Shaftsbury, Vermont, and his poetry captures the landscapes, seasons, and rhythms of New England life — its mountains, woods, fields, and quiet towns. Poems like The Mountain reflect his sensitivity to the Vermont landscape and his ability to see both its grandeur and its simplicity.