He is said to have been the last Red man
In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed--
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher's license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
'Whose business,--if I take it on myself,
Whose business--but why talk round the barn?--
When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.'
You can't get back and see it as he saw it.
It's too long a story to go into now.
You'd have to have been there and lived it.
They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.
Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.
'Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheel-pint?'
He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
The he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came upstairs alone--and gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with the meal-sack didn't catch--then.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.
Did you like this poem? Why not receive free classic poems by email? SUBSCRIBE
More Poems by Robert Frost
• A Dream Pang
• A Line-Storm Song
• A Minor Bird
• A Passing Glimpse
• A Peck Of Gold
• A Soldier
• A Time To Talk
• Acceptance
• Acquainted With The Night
• After Apple Picking
• Birches
• Bond And Free
• Canis Major
• Design
• Fire And Ice
• Flower-Gathering
• For Once, Then, Something
• Good-Bye, And Keep Cold
• Hannibal
• Home Burial
• Immigrants
• In A Disused Graveyard
• Love And A Question
• Mending Wall
• Mowing
• Not To Keep
• Nothing Gold Can Stay
• Now Close The Windows
• On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations
• Once By The Pacific
• Our Singing Strength
• Out, Out
• Reluctance
• Revelation
• Sitting By A Bush In Broad Sunlight
• Stars
• Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
• The Bear
• The Death Of The Hired Man
• The Exposed Nest
• The Freedom Of The Moon
• The Investment
• The Kitchen Chimney
• The Lockless Door
• The Need Of Being Versed In Country Things
• The Onset
• The Pasture
• The Road Not Taken
• The Rose Family
• The Runaway
• The Sound Of The Trees
• The Telephone
• The Trial By Existence
• The Vanishing Red
• To Earthward
• Tree At My Window
• Two Look At Two
• What Fifty Said
Also read poems by
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Emily Dickinson
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• Hilaire Belloc
• John Donne
• John Keats
• Lewis Carroll
• Robert Browning
• Robert Burns
• Robert Herrick
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Rudyard Kipling
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Sarah Teasdale
• Thomas Hardy
• Walt Whitman
• William Blake
• William Butler Yeats
• William Wordsworth
Robert Frost The Vanishing Red - Poem Lyrics - Robert Frost - The Vanishing Red
