Robert Frost

Hyla Brook

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Simile reversal

The ghost metaphor works both ways: sleigh-bells are faint/distant like frog calls, but also—both are sounds from a season that's gone. Frost is comparing the *absence* of sound to the absence of snow.

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Jewel-weed is real

Jewel-weed is a plant that grows in wet areas and actually does appear where water has been. Frost isn't being metaphorical here—he's describing what literally happens to a dry streambed in summer New England.

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

Final turn: definition

"A brook to none but who remember long" means it's only a brook in memory. The last line doesn't conclude the thought—it restarts it. We don't love things for what they *become*; we love them for what they *are*, which is exactly what this brook no longer is.

A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far

Final turn: definition

"A brook to none but who remember long" means it's only a brook in memory. The last line doesn't conclude the thought—it restarts it. We don't love things for what they *become*; we love them for what they *are*, which is exactly what this brook no longer is.

Final turn: definition

"A brook to none but who remember long" means it's only a brook in memory. The last line doesn't conclude the thought—it restarts it. We don't love things for what they *become*; we love them for what they *are*, which is exactly what this brook no longer is.

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

Final turn: definition

"A brook to none but who remember long" means it's only a brook in memory. The last line doesn't conclude the thought—it restarts it. We don't love things for what they *become*; we love them for what they *are*, which is exactly what this brook no longer is.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

A local brook, not a literary one

This poem deliberately refuses the Romantic tradition of brooks as symbols of permanence or renewal. Frost is writing about an actual New England streambed that dries every summer—not a metaphor for anything, just a fact of regional hydrology. [CONTEXT: Frost lived in New Hampshire and later Vermont; seasonal drought in small streams was something he observed directly.]

Notice what he's *not* doing: he doesn't make the dried brook mean anything about human mortality or loss of innocence. Instead, he's precise about what happens—the frogs go underground or the jewelweed colonizes the space. The poem's argument arrives in the final couplet: we value things for their actual properties, not for what we wish they were or what they symbolize. A brook that runs dry in June is still worth remembering *as a brook*, not as a lesson.

Why the strange ending matters

Most readers expect the final line to be a moral. Instead, Frost doubles back: "This as it will be seen is other far / Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song." He's calling out the entire tradition of literary brooks—the ones in Wordsworth, the ones that flow year-round in poems. His brook is "other far," radically different, because it *stops*.

The last line—"We love the things we love for what they are"—isn't sentimental. It's a philosophical claim about attention. You have to actually *know* something to love it properly. You have to remember that Hyla Brook dries up, that it's weak and temporary, that it's "a brook to none but who remember long." The poem teaches specificity as a form of love.