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Good-bye, and Keep Cold by Robert Frost

Analysis

"Good-bye, and Keep Cold" is a poem written by Robert Frost. This poem is about how the author doesn't want his orchard to get eaten by animals or die. He says that he will do whatever he can to protect it, even using a stick! This poem could be simply about the orchard or it could be about love. He would do whatever he could to protect his love.

This poem is written as one single stanza with many lines. It is rhymed in couplets.

Poem

Good-bye, and Keep Cold
By 

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.
Next: Love And A Question

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Nationality
American

Literary Movement
19th Century

Subjects
Nature, Winter