An Encounter
Robert Frost
Once on the kind of day called ‘weather breeder,’
When the heat slowly hazes and the sun
By its own power seems to be undone,
I was half boring through, half climbing through
A swamp of cedar. Choked with oil of cedar
And scurf of plants, and weary and overheated,
And sorry I had left the road I knew,
I paused and rested on a sort of hook
That had me by the coat as good as seated,
And since there was no other way to look,
Looked up toward heaven, and there, against the blue,
Stood over me a resurrected tree,
A tree that had been down and raised again—
A barkless spectre. He had halted too,
As if for fear of treading upon me.
I saw the strange position of his hands—
Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands
Of wire with something in it from men to men.
‘You here?’ I said. ‘Where aren’t you nowadays?
And what’s the news you carry—if you know?
And tell me where you’re off for—Montreal?
Me? I’m not off for anywhere at all.
Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways
Half looking for the Orchid Calypso.’
VOCABULARY
Weather breeder - an idiomatic expression, a day that’s a ‘weather breeder’ is a fine,
calm day without much weather at all, but also one that feels unnaturally or unstably
calm - it is often the kind of calm day that prefigures a storm or extreme weather.
To bore through - to create a hole through a dense material
Cedar - a type of evergreen pine tree that can grow in marshes and swampland
Swamp - a forested wetland
, Scurf - flakes or scales on the surface of something
Weary - tired, exhausted
Barkless - smooth, not having bark
Spectre - a terrifying ghost
Montreal - a city in Canada, around 400km from New Hampshire where Frost lived
at the time
STORY / SUMMARY
The speaker tells us a story about a calm day, a ‘weather breeder’, where the sun had
lost its power and he found himself walking through a swamp full of cedar trees. He’s
half climbing, half wading through the mud and surrounded by half-floating plants and
the overpowering smell of the cedar trees. He was tired, too hot and starting to regret
that he’d left the normal path through the forest. Deciding to stop and rest, he hooked
himself up by his coat on a tree branch (there would have been nowhere to sit down,
as it was a bog, and stopping would be dangerous as it’s possible to get stuck or
drown). He’s sick of looking at the swamp and it all looks the same, so for a change he
looks up ‘to heaven’, to the sky above him. He encounters a ‘barkless spectre’ - a
telephone line that was towering above him against the sky. It seems like the pole is a
kind of giant who has stopped at this point too, as it looks like he is about to step on
the speaker. The ‘hands’ are up near the top - as if he has his hands up, in surprise or
surrender. There are ‘yellow strands/ of wire’ caught in the top of the pole, that are
used for communication ‘from men to men’.
The final six lines convey dialogue, the speaker’s direct words to the tree. He says he’s
surprised to see the telephone line here, but then nowadays they are everywhere. He
asks whether he knows the information that’s he communicating and where it’s going -
is it Montreal? He says that he’s not heading anywhere in particular, he’s just in the
swamp because sometimes he likes to wander off the normal walking paths in the
forest to search for the Calypso Orchid flower.
SPEAKER / VOICE
The speaker uses first person narrative to recount an anecdote (a personal story)
about how he decided to walk off into the dangerous and difficult swampy areas of a
