Read an Excerpt
100 Great Poems for Girls
By Grand Central Publishing
ISBN: 9780446563840
NATURE
Even in the biggest cities, there are signs of nature: a bright flower peeks out of a crack in the sidewalk, a vine climbs up the side of a building, spring rains wash over dusty streets. The natural world is present wherever we are, and each season brings a host of new growth with different colors, shapes, and smells. Nature can evoke powerful emotions, which might be why it inspires so many poets. Through the lens of poetry, a garden can bloom or a rose might simply be just a rose, and you’ll see that the best way to learn about the stars is not in a classroom, but by looking up at the night sky.
A Girl’s Garden
Robert Frost
A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, “Why not?”
In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, “Just it.”
And he said, “That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.”
It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don’t mind now.
She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load,
And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.
A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees.
And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
Or at least may be.
Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.
Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, “I know!
It’s as when I was a farmer—”
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.
Continues...
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