Randall Thompson: Frostiana (The Lied and Art Song Texts Page: Texts and Translations to Lieder, mélodies, canzoni, and other classical vocal music)


I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha'n't be gone long.
You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother.
It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha'n't be gone long.
You come too.

?. The road not taken

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Mountain Interval

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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

?. Stopping by woods on a snowy evening

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

New Hampshire

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Whose woods these are I think I know
 [ ... ]

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?. The telephone

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Mountain Interval

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"When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don't say I didn't, for I heard you say -
You spoke from that flower on the window sill -
Do you remember what it was you said?"

"First tell me what it was you thought you heard."
"Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word -
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say -
Someone said 'Come' - I heard it as I bowed."

"I may have thought as much, but not aloud."

"Well, so I came."

?. A girl's garden

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Mountain Interval


A neighbor of mine in the village
  Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
  A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
  To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
  And he said, "Why not?"

In casting about for a corner
  He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
  And he said, "Just it."

And he said, "That ought to make you
  An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
  On your slim-jim arm."

It was not enough of a garden,
  Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
  But she don't mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
  Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
  Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
  And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
  Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
  Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
  And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
  That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
  Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
  When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
  A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
  How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
  She says, "I know!

It's as when I was a farmer--"
  Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
  To the same person twice.

?. Choose Something Like a Star

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Come In


O Star (the fairest one in sight)
 [ ... ]

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?. Come In

Language: English

Authorship

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

A Further Range

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As I came to the edge of the woods
 [ ... ]

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