WAIT-NOT YET

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
  Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand?
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.

He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
  In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.

A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.

He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
  And slept.

The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. 

One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does itof a winter night.  

 _Robert Frost - 1916 Mountain Interval Collection     

 Perhaps the most haunting poem in Mountain Interval is "An Old Man’s Winter Night," a poem about an old man dying in the wintry climate of New England and alone: "All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him / Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars." The poem meditates implicitly on the human condition as a whole, though it remains neatly, even maniacally, focused on the single old man here who "stood with barrels round him -- at a loss." The old man is somehow made to bear the weight of all human loneliness, even though "a light he was to no one but himself / Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, / A quiet light, and then not even that."