Goodbye, And Keep Cold
by Robert Frost
This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don’t want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don’t want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don’t want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn’t be idle to call
I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don’t want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.”
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an axe—
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard’s arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God.
This poem reminds me strangely of our home, our community and family left behind. “Stay cold,” I want to say to them. Move slowly, enter into an ice age that has change creeping up on you instead of bolting along at its usual gallop. Now that we are digesting the idea that we have come away, maybe not to return to our place in California, I am finding that I am longing for everything to stay the same while I am away. We were too close to appreciate each other while we were together, but now that distance has driven its wedge, I keep looking behind us as we move forward… wondering if that stultifying sameness that I was unhappy with is worth keeping. Shouldn’t I be glad that everything will be new when I return? But I’m not…
That the poet acknowledges that the minute he’s out of sight of his precious orchard it will be out of mind is a hard truth – but it’s definitely true. And no matter how slowly he bids his orchard grow, it will be all awkward limbs and things he has to prune when he returns. All things must change. At least we can hope that the pruning, the splicing, the grafting and the weeding will be light.
