Lines 18-22 Summary

Lines 18-19

You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. 

• Looks like our glacier from lines 16-17 isn't the nicest of fellows. He just might give us the cold shoulder on this journey. But, our speaker tells us, we should probably let that slide. After all, what's a glacier if not cool? Technically, he's frozen, after all. 
• The speaker also reminds us that like the house and the farm and the town, the glacier is no longer there. He's left traces, sure—remember those groves in the road? But he's long since retreated back up north, what with global warming and all. 
• And yet, he still haunts the mountainside. Like the ghost of a house the speaker mentions in line 5, the memory of the glacier lingers. 
• Finally, Shmoopers, we get a place name: Panther Mountain. And hey, as it turns out, that's a real place. We're thinking, since he's such an east-coaster, that Frost is referencing Panther Mountain in the Catskills.

Lines 20-22

Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. 

• Okay, Shmoopers, we admit that these lines are a wee bit hard to parse. So let's break it down. 
• The speaker tells us that we shouldn't be bothered by a "serial ordeal." In other words, we shouldn't mind something that repeatedly happens to us on this journey. 
• The ordeal he's referring to here is the fact that we're being watched. Creepy. And what's watching us? Well, we're not quite sure. But we do know that whatever's watching us is doing it through forty cellar holes. 
• A cellar hole is a hole dug in the ground for a cellar. Yep, that makes sense. Of course if you can see the cellar hole, that means that there's no cellar filling it. Which either means the cellar never got built, or it's long since been destroyed. Given the themes of past and memory in this poem, we're betting it's the latter. 
• While we don't know exactly what's watching us from these cellar holes, we do know what it's like, thanks to the speaker's simile in line 22: "as if by eye pairs out of forty firkins."
• What the firkin is a firkin, you ask? A quick Google search would tell you that it's an antique cask or barrel once used to hold beer or butter. You can just picture little gremlins hunched into casks peeking their little fiery eyes out at you. At least, that's the image the simile is giving us. 
• Um, is it just Shmoop, or did this poem just get seriously creepy? We've gone back in time again, to an era of firkins. And as if that weren't weird enough, now we're being watched. The hairs on the back of our necks are really starting to stand up.