In 1959 the publishers Holt, Rinehart and Winston hosted a dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan celebrating Robert Frost’s 85th birthday. At the time, Frost was easily America’s most popular poet, and many readers considered him to be a poet of charming poems that danced rhythmically along in gracefully rhyming lines. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” illustrates this view and is one his poems that most young students would have memorized and recited for their English classes.
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 aa 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.
No one would deny the mellifluous quality of these lines. The poem has a compelling musical rhythm (meter) that makes it easy to memorize. Its images are physically soothing and visually serene: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” The little speech to his horse is playfully quaint and even amusing. The speaker’s act of “…stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow” then resuming his journey to fulfill those “promises,” can be interpreted as a brief respite during which he feels a beautiful tranquility. Perhaps he is even having a transcendent moment, something like Wordsworth’s experiences in his poems about nature. But some readers sense something darker in the poem, that the speaker is instead being pulled into an unknown, into an oblivion that will erase his existence. Afterall, he finds himself isolated from humanity and has interrupted his progress enough to confound his horse’s sense of how they should be proceeding. Though “The woods are lovely,” they are also “dark and deep” and extend beyond human perception and comprehension. They stretch into an unknown and pose what some readers saw as a dark terror that they also found in other poems by Frost. The Columbia English professor, critic and scholar, Lionel Trilling, when he spoke at Frost’s 85th birthday dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria, commented on this element in Frost’s poetry. He said: “I think of Robert Frost as a terrifying poet. Call him, if it makes things easier, a tragic poet, but it might be useful every now and then to step out from under the shelter of that literary word. The universe he conceives is a terrifying universe…Read the poem called “Design” and see if you sleep the better for it. Read Neither Out Far nor In Deep, which seems to me the most perfect poem of our time, and see if you are warmed by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived.” Trilling’s remarks stunned the audience attending the party, provoked letters of protest to the New York Times book critic J. Donald Adams and surprised but did not upset Frost. Reading “Design” confirms Trilling assertion:
Design I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-heal? What had brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.
This poem, which is a Petrarchan sonnet, has two parts, the octave (8 lines) and the sestet (6 lines). In the octave, the speaker describes an incident in which he comes upon the “white heal-all” flower and finds a spider holding in its grasp a dead moth. The speaker’s first response to what he sees can appear almost like a children’s story (Charlotte’s Web), with its “dimpled spider” a white flower, and a moth imagined as white “satin cloth.” Any such impression is obliterated with unequivocal force by line 4: “Assorted characters of death and blight.” The matter-of-fact wording leaves no doubt about the violence of the scene. In the next four lines (5-8), the speaker links the noun, “characters,” of the previous line to the verb phrase “Mixed ready to begin the morning right.” Why does he say, “begin the morning right”? What could be right about this image of insect carnage, of the dead moth wings as a “paper kite”?
The sestet proposes an answer through a series of questions. The speaker asks why the flower is white, what brought the spider to that flower and finally what “steered” the moth to that flower. Is what the speaker sees something governed by a malign supernatural power who orchestrates appalling violence or is it simply another indifferent process of nature’s cycle of life and death?
“Design” can convince a reader that Frost believed the universe was truly a place that inspired the terror in Frost’s poetry that Lionel Trilling spoke of in his speech at Frost’s 85th birthday. The world is an alien, hostile place where predators wait to ambush prey. Another poem flexing this point of view is “Stars”:
Stars How countlessly they congregate O'er our tumultuous snow, Which flows in shapes as tall as tree When wintry winds do blow!-- As if with keenness for our fate, Our faltering few steps on To white rest, and a place of rest Invisible at dawn,-- And yet with neither love nor hate, Those stars like some snow-white Minerva's snow-white marble eyes Without the gift of sight.
The poem begins on a winter’s night, with snow blown deep and tall, while above the speaker stars “congregate” as if intentionally gathering for some purpose. The second stanza suggests why the speaker feels the stars are shining down on us: “As if with keenness for our fate,” as if to light his way till the dawn arrives. This guiding light of supernatural power is snatched away by the third stanza which concludes the poem and abandons human beings in an indifferent universe. The stars have no more interest in humanity than a cold, white statue of the Roman goddess wisdom, Minerva whose blind eyes shed only more darkness.
No great poet is simply one sided and Frost is no exception. His poetry also reveals the influence of the romantic poets Wordsworth, Keats, and Emerson and the creative intimations of mystic vision. An early poem by Frost illustrating this vision is “Going for Water.”
Going for Water The well was dry beside the door, And so we went with pail and can Across the fields behind the house To seek the brook if still it ran; Not loth to have excuse to go, Because the autumn eve was fair (Though chill), because the fields were ours, And by the brook our woods were there. We ran as if to meet the moon That slowly dawned behind the trees, The barren boughs without the leaves, Without the birds, without the breeze. But once within the wood, we paused Like gnomes that hid us from the moon, Ready to run to hiding new With laughter when she found us soon. Each laid on other a staying hand To listen ere we dared to look, And in the hush we joined to make We heard, we knew we heard the brook. A note as from a single place, A slender tinkling fall that made Now drops that floated on the pool Like peals, and now a silver blade.
In the first two stanzas, the speaker and his companion notice their water well is dry and head out with a can and pail to collect water from a nearby brook. After this literal, though rhyming, description, the next four stanzas become an adventure, a journey metaphorical and spiritual. In stanza 3, the young pair enter the woods running “as if to meet the moon” through denuded and bird barren trees. In their innocence they imagine they are gnomes hiding from the moon. They join hands, listen and in a hush hear the brook. In the last stanza, a transcendent moment descends upon the children: they hear a “note,” and see drops that floated on the pool / Like pearls, and now a silver blade.” The chore of fetching water becomes a mystic visionary experience absorbed through the vehicle of nature.
Reading Robert Frost’s poetry sometimes inclines us toward the visionary experience such as we find in the poems of William Wordsworth or Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other times, Frost finds himself immersed within an indifferent universe and his verse reflects his bleak interpretation. This fascinating duality informs so much of his work that the reader can be at a loss to pin down where Frost stands philosophically. And it’s that ambiguity, along with his extraordinary lyricism that make his poems always compelling.
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