Explore "A Brook in the City" by Robert Frost on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The farm house lingers, though averse to square / With the new city street it has to wear / A number in. But what about the brook / That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength / And impulse, having dipped a finger length / And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed / A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down / From growing under pavements of a town; / The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force / No longer needed? Staunch it at its source / With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown / Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone / In fetid darkness still to live and run --
And all for nothing it had ever done / Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps / That such a brook ran water. But I wonder / If from its being kept forever under / The thoughts may not have risen that so keep / This new-built city from both work and sleep.