A Witness Tree

A Witness Tree is a poetry collection by Robert Frost, most of which are short lyric, first published in 1942 by Henry Holt and Company in New York. The collection was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1943.

A Witness Tree

Author	Robert Frost
Language	English
Genre	Poetry
Publisher	Henry Holt and Company
Publication date	1942
Publication place	U.S.
Pages	68
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1943)

Background

This collection was published after several unfortunate tragedies had occurred in Frost's personal life, including his daughter Marjorie's death in 1934, his wife's death in 1938, and his son Carol's suicide in 1940. Despite these losses, Frost continued to work on his poetry and eventually fell in love with his secretary Kay Marrison, who became the primary inspiration of the love poems in this collection. This collection is the last of Frost's books that demonstrates the seamless lyric quality of his earlier poems. The most popular poem of this volume is "The Gift Outright", which was recited at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961.^[1] The book is 42 poems in length, and it is broken into five sections "One or Two," "Two or More," "Time Out," "Quantula," and "Over Back." In the book, Frost is interested in race, mortality, religion, science, and philosophy. The imagery is drawn from the natural world and from the ordinary, as is the case in "All Revelation," in which Frost demonstrates the revelation inside a head-tilt ("a head thrusts" (14)). Something small, a rock, a leaf, a head-tilt, inspires epiphanic turns in the poems, which often utilize the form and rhyme of a sonnet. For example, three of the five sections begin with a sonnet. Another form Frost uses is the heroic couplet, which is often down-played through the use of enjambment, understatement, and conversational language. It gives an ironic, satirical tone to many of the voices in the collection. Frost uses racist language, including racial slurs and white supremacist ideology, in the book.

Contents

• Beech 9
• Sycamore 9

ONE OR TWO

• 1 The Silken Tent 13
• 2 All Revelation 14
• 3 Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length 15
• 4 Come In 16
• 5 I Could Give All to Time 17
• 6 Carpe Diem 18
• 7 The Wind and the Rain 20
• 8 The Most of It 23
• 9 Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same 24
• 10 The Subverted Flower 25
• 11 Wilful Homing 28
• 12 A Cloud Shadow 29
• 13 The Quest of the Purple-Fringed 30
• 14 The Discovery of the Madeiras 32

TWO OR MORE

• 1 The Gift Outright 41
• 2 Triple Bronze 42
• 3 Our Hold on the Planet 43
• 4 To a Young Wretch (Boethian) 44
• 5 The Lesson for Today 46

TIME OUT

• 1 Time Out 55
• 2 To a Moth Seen in Winter 56
• 3 A Considerable Speck (Microscopic) 57
• 4 The Lost Follower 59
• 5 November 61
• 6 The Rabbit Hunter 62
• 7 A Loose Mountain (Telescopic) 63
• 8 It Is Almost the Year Two Thousand 64

QUANTULA

• 1 In a Poem 67
• 2 On Our Sympathy with the Under Dog 68
• 3 A Question 69
• 4 Boeotian 70
• 5 The Secret Sits 71
• 6 An Equalizer 72
• 7 A Semi-Revolution 73
• 8 Assurance 74
• 9 An Answer 75

OVER BACK

• 1 Trespass 79
• 2 A Nature Note 80
• 3 Of the Stones of the Place 81
• 4 Not of School Age 82
• 5 A Serious Step Lightly Taken 84
• 6 The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus 86

See also

• The Witness Tree