Robert Frost

Christmas Trees

City withdraws, country remains

Frost establishes a spatial division that structures the whole poem. The city's absence creates the condition for what happens next—the stranger's arrival.

THE CITY had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the country;
When between whirls of snow not come to lie
And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove
A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,
Yet did in country fashion in that there
He sat and waited till he drew us out
A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.
He proved to be the city come again
To look for something it had left behind
And could not do without and keep its Christmas.
He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;
My woods—the young fir balsams like a place

Churches and spires

The speaker's metaphor for young firs reveals how he already sees these trees—not as commodities, but as something sacred. The buyer will see only inventory.

Where houses all are churches and have spires.
I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.
I doubt if I was tempted for a moment
To sell them off their feet to go in cars
And leave the slope behind the house all bare,
Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.
I’d hate to have them know it if I was.
Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except
As others hold theirs or refuse for them,

Trial by market

Frost uses economic language to describe something deeper—a test of values. Everything must eventually face market judgment, whether the owner wants it to or not.

Beyond the time of profitable growth,
The trial by market everything must come to.
I dallied so much with the thought of selling.
Then whether from mistaken courtesy
And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether
From hope of hearing good of what was mine,
I said, “There aren’t enough to be worth while.”
“I could soon tell how many they would cut,
You let me look them over.”
“You could look.
But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”
Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close
That lop each other of boughs, but not a few
Quite solitary and having equal boughs
All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,
Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,
With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”
I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.
We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,
And came down on the north.
He said, “A thousand.”
“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”
He felt some need of softening that to me:
“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”
Then I was certain I had never meant
To let him have them. Never show surprise!
But thirty dollars seemed so small beside
The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents
(For that was all they figured out apiece),
Three cents so small beside the dollar friends
I should be writing to within the hour

Dollar friends in cities

The speaker knows city people who'd pay more per tree than the bulk offer. This isn't just about money—it's about the gap between what things are worth to different people.

Would pay in cities for good trees like those,
Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools
Could hang enough on to pick off enough.
A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,

Herewith a Merry Christmas

The formal phrase 'herewith' (as if enclosing something) combined with the impossible gesture creates the poem's emotional resolution—wishing without transaction.

In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

How Frost uses economic language to defend non-economic values

The poem's central tension isn't whether the speaker will sell—he won't—but how he arrives at that decision. Frost gives us a buyer who speaks the language of commerce fluently ('a thousand,' 'thirty dollars,' 'apiece'), and a speaker who initially dallies with the sale, even calculating what he'd lose. This isn't a simple morality tale about rural virtue versus urban greed.

Instead, Frost uses the speaker's own economic reasoning to undermine the sale. The speaker calculates that city friends would pay more per tree than the bulk offer of three cents each. He realizes that giving the trees away would actually demonstrate their greater value than selling them. By the poem's end, the speaker has turned market logic against itself: the trees prove their worth precisely by being unsellable. The final image—wishing a tree could fit in a letter—abandons commerce entirely for a different economy: the gift that cannot be quantified or transported.

Why the speaker never actually refuses the buyer

Notice that the speaker never directly says 'no.' He says there 'aren't enough to be worth while,' then lets the buyer tour the pasture anyway. Even after calculating the insulting three-cent price, he doesn't tell the buyer to leave. This hesitation matters.

Frost is showing how difficult it is to refuse the market's logic once you've entered its frame. The moment the speaker admits he 'hadn't thought of them as Christmas Trees,' he's already begun to see them through the buyer's eyes. The dallying, the calculations, the comparisons to what friends would pay—these aren't signs of temptation so much as signs of how thoroughly the market colonizes thought. The speaker resists not through moral certainty but through a kind of economic revelation: he realizes the trees are worth more to him precisely because they can't be reduced to the buyer's price. The poem ends not with refusal but with a shift to an entirely different register—the personal letter, the impossible gift—where market value simply doesn't apply.