Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.
He thought that I was after him for a feather—
The white one in his tail; like one who takes
Everything said as personal to himself.
One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.
And then there was a pile of wood for which
I forgot him and let his little fear
Carry him off the way I might have gone,
Without so much as wishing him good-night.
He went behind it to make his last stand.
It was a cord of maple, cut and split
And piled—and measured, four by four by eight.
And not another like it could I see.
No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it.
And it was older sure than this year's cutting,
Or even last year's or the year's before.
The wood was gray and the bark warping off it
The moment is a perfect illustration of Frost’s distinction between what it means to believe in things and what it means.The latter is the special task of him who would be poet and person. In this symbolic re-enactment, the speaker believes into existence an entity which was potentially there in the emerging but partial lines of the earlier stages of his journey inward. The woodpile, according to Frost’s poetic theory, had its beginnings.While in one sense, then, the speaker only “reveals” and “discovers” the woodpile, in another he can be said to have “made” it.
The Wood-pile