A Star in a Stone-boat

by Robert Frost

　　

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A Star in a Stone-boat, for Lincoln MacVeagh, is featured in New Hampshire, A Poem; with Notes and Grace Notes, 1923. Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire in 1924. Never tell me that not one star of allThat slip from heaven at night and softly fallHas 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 darkAnd lifeless from an interrupted arc.He did not recognize in that smooth coalThe one thing palpable besides the soulTo penetrate the air in which we roll.He did not see how like a flying thingIt 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 trailIt drew back in its body like a snail);Nor know that he might move it from the spotThe harm was done; from having been star-shotThe very nature of the soil was hotAnd burning to yield flowers instead of grain,Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rainPoured on them by his prayers prayed in vain.He moved it roughly with an iron bar,He loaded an old stone-boat with the starAnd not, as you might think, a flying car,Such as even poets would admit perforceMore practical than Pegasus the horseIf it could put a star back in its course.He dragged it through the ploughed ground at a paceBut faintly reminiscent of the raceOf jostling rock in interstellar space.It went for building stone, and I, as thoughCommanded in a dream, forever goTo 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 eyeExcept at night to places in the skyWhere 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 searchI 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 worthTo 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 spinTo show its worldly nature and beginTo chafe and shuffle in my calloused palmAnd run off in strange tangents with my armAs fish do with the line in first alarm.Such as it is, it promises the prizeOf the one world complete in any sizeThat I am like to compass, fool or wise.

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