Explore "The Onset" by Robert Frost on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Always the same, when on a fated night / At last the gathered snow lets down as white / As may be in dark woods, and with a song / It shall not make again all winter long / Of hissing on the yet uncovered ground, / I almost stumble looking up and round, / As one who overtaken by the end / Gives up his errand, and lets death descend / Upon him where he is, with nothing done / To evil, no important triumph won, / More than if life had never been begun.
Yet all the precedent is on my side: / I know that winter death has never tried / The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap / In long storms an undrifted four feet deep / As measured against maple, birch and oak, / It cannot check the peeper's silver croak; / And I shall see the snow all go down hill / In water of a slender April rill / That flashes tail through last year's withered brake / And dead weeds, like a disappearing snake.
Nothing will be left white but here a birch, / And there a clump of houses with a church.