Posted on Monday, November 17, 2025
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by Robert B. Charles
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Robert Frost captures the imagination and pace of winter, poems like “Stopped by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and that ageless line: “Two roads diverged in the woods and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.” But there is more, no cost, and not to be lost.
Frost, a practiced curmudgeon, was also a kindly New Englander. He was able to say a lot in a little space, fit a bucket of meaning into a tablespoon, truckload into a wheelbarrow, sometimes in unrhyming prose, other times in a single, short line.
He was able to spot common sense – important now, when endangered, as much unwanted as uncommon. His words will make you smile and also think.
“Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can’t, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep saying it.” Or: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.”
Behind his writing often lies something unsaid, which leaves a reader – currently turning pages of his 1934 classic, “A Boy’s Will,” – asking “what prompted that?”
Just as scholars and casual readers wonder what Frost’s real intent was in writing “Two roads diverged …,” a line he never fully explained, other lines do that too.
He gave advice you wondered at, true as it was: “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up.” Was there a bull behind a fence that he took down?
“The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” Was that a heatwave, thunderstorm, snow, or something deeper, a thought about age and youth?
A worker, he wrote: “The world is full of willing people; some willing to work, the rest willing to let them.” In life, he was a quiet conservative, avoided the label, no time for socialism. He was spiritual but not ideological, practical, and loved nature.
He did like to laugh, and to make people laugh, thus poems like “Brown’s Descent,” when a farmer steps on an icy slope and has the ride of his life, or his many one-liners. “A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age,” or “I’m not confused, I’m just well mixed.” He also says, “If we couldn’t laugh, we would all go insane.” True.
As winter comes, I read again his many poems of the season. Some are gentle observations set to verse, on stone walls, woodpiles, and others are deeper, on the universe.
One few know, but it fits the chilling season, is “Stars” (1934). It invites more fireside reading. “How countlessly they congregate, O’er our tumultuous snow, Which flows in shapes as tall as trees, When wintry winds do blow! As if with keenness for our fate, Our faltering few steps on, To white rest, and a place of rest, Invisible at dawn – And yet with neither love nor hate, Those stars like snow-white, Minerva’s snow-white Marble eyes, Without the gift of sight.” Winter does slow us down, at least if you are rural, and that is fine. It gives us time to appreciate simplicity and rhyme, to stare into the sky, ponder things lost, at no cost.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, Maine attorney, ten-year naval intelligence officer (USNR), and 25-year businessman. He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (North Country Press, 2018), and “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024). He is the National Spokesman for AMAC. Today, he is running to be Maine’s next Governor (please visit BobbyforMaine.com to learn more)!
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