Miscellaneous Poems to 1920/Fragmentary Blue

by Robert Frost

For other versions of this work, see Fragmentary Blue.

5. Fragmentary Blue

(From Harper’s Magazine, July 1920.)

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
  
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—5
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.