Robert Frost - A Star in a Stone-Boat lyrics

For Lincoln MacVeagh Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold And saving that its weight suggested gold And tugged it from his first too certain hold He noticed nothing in it to remark He was not used to handling stars thrown dark And lifeless from an interrupted arc He did not recognize in that smooth coal The one thing palpable besides the soul To penetrate the air in which we roll He did not see how like a flying thing It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing One not so large for flying in a ring And a long Bird of Paradise's tail (Though these when not in use to fly and trail It drew back in its body like a snail); Nor know that be might move it from the spot— The harm was done: from having been star-shot The very nature of the soil was hot And burning to yield flowers instead of grain Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain He moved it roughly with an iron bar He loaded an old stone-boat with the star And not, as you might think, a flying car Such as even poets would admit perforce More practical than Pegasus the horse If it could put a star back in its course He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace But faintly reminiscent of the race Of jostling rock in interstellar space It went for building stone, and I, as though Commanded in a dream, forever go To right the wrong that this should have been so. Yet ask where else it could have gone as well I do not know—I cannot stop to tell: He might have left it lying where it fell From following walls I never lift my eye Except at night to places in the sky Where showers of charted meteors let fly Some may know what they seek in school and church And why they seek it there; for what I search I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch; Sure that though not a star of d**h and birth So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth— Though not, I say, a star of d**h and sin It yet has poles, and only needs a spin To show its worldly nature and begin To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm And run off in strange tangents with my arm As fish do with the line in first alarm Such as it is, it promises the prize Of the one world complete in any size That I am like to compa**, fool or wise