The British School of Bahrain Department of English
Unit One Section B, AS English Literature
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by Robert Frost
John Ciardi, a literary critic, wrote:”…this poem begins as a seemingly-simple narration of a seemingly-simple incident but ends by suggesting meanings far beyond anything specifically referred to in the narrative. And even readers with only the most casual interest in poetry might be made to note the additional fact that, though the poem suggests those larger meanings, it is very careful never to abandon its pretence to being simple narration. There is duplicity at work. The poet pretends to be talking about one thing, and all the while he is talking about many others.
Many readers are forever unable to accept the poet's essential duplicity. It is almost safe to say that a poem is never about what it seems to be about. As much could be said of the proverb. The bird in the hand, the rolling stone, the stitch in time never (except by an artful double-deception) intend any sort of statement about birds, stones, or sewing. The incident of this poem, one must conclude, is at root a metaphor.” John Ciardi, in, ‘Robert Frost: The Way to the Poem,’ Sunday Review, XL (April 12, 1958),
Frost on Frost ‘When a friendly critic asked if the last two lines in "Stopping by Woods" referred to going to Heaven, and, by implication, death, the poet replied, "No, all that means is to get the hell out of there."
Frost once remarked that "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was the kind of poem he'd like to print on one page, to be followed with "forty pages of footnotes."
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" contains "all I ever knew."
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is, he says, "a series of almost reckless commitments. I feel good in having guarded it so. [It is] . . . my heavy duty poem to be examined for the rime [rhyme] pairs."
"That one I've been more bothered with than anybody has ever been with any poem in just pressing it for more than it should be pressed for. It means enough without its being pressed." And, in a biting tone, he adds, "I don't say that somebody shouldn't press it, but I don't want to be there." Reginald L. Cook, "Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems," American Literature, XXVIII
( March 1956)
Pairs
In pairs, read and annotate the poem. Describe the scene and the incident in your own words. Examine the organisation, metre, rhyme and language of the poem, making notes around the text. Did you ever meet this poem when you were younger?
Evaluating the Critics
1. Read what critic John Ciardi has to say about the poem and summarise his view in one sentence.
2. Read the statements by Frost. Which parts of his statements seem to agree with Ciardi’s view? Which seem to contradict him?
3. Is it likely that the poem is biographical? Explain.
4. Look again at Ciardi’s description of the poem as ‘a seemingly-simple narration.’ Which aspects of this poem give the impression of simplicity? Look at form (choice of type of poem), structure (its organisation), voice, metre, imagery, rhyme and diction (vocabulary). Give examples, commenting carefully.
5. Find a good definition of ‘duplicity’. Which aspects hint at what Ciardi refers to as ‘the essential duplicity’ of the poem? Explain precisely.
6. Why might Ciardi contend that ‘the incident of this poem is at root a metaphor’? How could you support this view? Refer closely to details.
Going Further
7. Write ten to fifteen lines, expressing your theory as to why Frost seems at first glance to discourage the reading of the poem as a metaphor while also admitting that it does have layers of significance. Why does he ‘feel good in having guarded it so,’ do you think?
Linking Structure to Meaning
8. Think carefully about what Frost refers to as ‘a series of commitments’. What ‘commitments’ could he be referring to? What hints are there in the poem that the speaker has obligations? Now look again closely at the rhyme scheme. Can you link the presence/absence of rhyme to a sense of commitment, or at other points, to a sense of freedom?
Theme
9. Why do you think that Frost says that the poem is about the need to ‘get the hell out of there’? What darker significance might the poem contain? Refer closely to the text in your answer. Why might the poem be unsuitable for study by younger readers?
Essay
10. Read Edmund Wilson’s view of the poem (below). Explain his view in your own words. To what extent do you think he is right? Support your view carefully with textual evidence. Do you think that Robert Frost would agree with him, given his own comments about the poem?
" In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" we hear the more than human music of a typical human situation: the insistent whisper of death at the heart of life. For we are all travellers, travelling alone through haunted country. Strange voices lure us away to nature; friendly voices call us back to men. Whichever call we heed, we sleep at last. And often today, in tragic indecision, confused by the conflicting voices, we fall asleep murmuring of the miles we have to go.” -Edmund Wilson
Rhyme Scheme and Metre
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter in the Rubaiyat (Persian for ‘quatrain’) stanza created by Edward Fitzgerald. Each verse (save the last) follows an a-a-b-a rhyming scheme, with the following verse's a's rhyming with that verse's b, which is a chain rhyme. (Another example of a chain rhyme is the terza rima used in Dante's Inferno.) Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.
www.wikipedia.org
Frost's quatrains could be a variation of the terza rima form used by Dante in the Divine Comedy. Terza rima has the pattern aba bcb cdc ded. . . . The "Inferno," the first book of the Divine Comedy, begins with these lines (as translated into English, which costs us the rhymes):
Midway in our life's journey I awoke
To find myself alone in a dark wood.
Who knows how I came that way . . . (1-3)
...it is not by any means certain, but it is certainly possible, and perhaps even probable, that Frost intends this similarity in stanzaic structure and rhyme scheme to subtly invoke Dante's "Inferno."
Dante's Divine Comedy is one of the most famous poems in the Western literary tradition. Frost, like any other major poet, knew his Dante. Even if he did not originally have in mind such an allusion to Dante's "Inferno," he would have recognized it after having written the poem, and then would have chosen either to obscure it or to leave it in his poem for his readers to notice--for he could be sure that all of his readers with a certain level of knowledge about the poetic tradition would notice the similarity.
What, you might ask, would Frost gain by such an allusion? ...Dante's lines refer to the "dark night of the soul," the point at which the soul despairs of finding God. Frost was a well-known depressive, and many of his poems deal with the depressive's sense of isolation from normal human activity and habitation. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" has many levels of meaning, but certainly one aspect of its meaning is the persona's sense of isolation and the lure of death.
http://tinablue.homestead.com/literaryallusion.html
persona: the character, constructed by the poet, who is speaking in the poem.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost