Robert Frost (1874 –1963) was a modern American poet, who has
composed many poems about the modern man and his behavior. Some of his poems
are as follows:
1. Out!
Out!
2. Mending
Wall
3. Road
Not Taken
4. Stopping
By Woods
- After Apple Picking
6. My
Butterfly
7. A
Minor Bird
His poems are realistic
depictions of rural life and they reveal the reality of modern life. Frost
frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in
the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical
themes. Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime and is the only poet
to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one
of America's rare public literary figures, almost an artistic
institution. He was awarded the Congressional
Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961,
Frost was named Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Frost's father was a teacher and later an
editor Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in
1892.[5] Frost's mother
joined the Swedenborgian church and had him baptized in it, but he left
it as an adult. Although known for his later association with rural life, Frost
grew up in the city, and he published his first poem in his high school's
magazine. Frost returned home to teach and to work at various jobs,
including helping his mother teach her class of unruly boys, delivering
newspapers, and working in a factory maintaining carbon arc lamps. He did not
enjoy these jobs, feeling his true calling was poetry. In 1894, he sold his
first poem, "My Butterfly. An Elegy" (published in the November 8,
1894, edition of the New York
Independent) for $15 ($449 today). Proud of his accomplishment, he
proposed marriage to Elinor Miriam White, but she demurred, wanting to finish
college (at St. Lawrence University) before
they married. Frost then went on an excursion to the Great
Dismal Swamp in Virginia and asked Elinor again upon his return. Having
graduated, she agreed, and they were married at Lawrence, Massachusetts on
December 19, 1895. Frost attended Harvard University from 1897 to 1899, but he left voluntarily due
to illness.[6][7][8] Shortly before
his death, Frost's grandfather purchased a farm for Robert and
Elinor in Derry, New Hampshire; Frost worked the farm for nine years while writing
early in the mornings and producing many of the poems that would later become
famous. Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful and he returned to the field
of education as an English teacher at New Hampshire's n 1912, Frost sailed with
his family to Great Britain, settling first
in Beaconsfield,
a small town outside London. While teaching at the University of Michigan, he
was awarded a lifetime appointment at the university as a Fellow in Letters.
Robert Frost's personal life was plagued by grief and loss. In 1885 when he was
11, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving the
family with just eight dollars. Frost's mother died of cancer in 1900. In 1920,
he had to commit his younger sister Jeanie to a mental hospital, where she died
nine years later. Mental illness apparently ran in Frost's family, as both he
and his mother suffered from depression, and his daughter Irma was committed to a mental
hospital in 1947. Frost's wife, Elinor, also experienced bouts of depression.[18] Elinor and Robert
Frost had six children. Frost's wife, who had heart problems throughout her
life, developed breast cancer in 1937, and
died of heart failure in 1938.[18] the greatest of the American poets of this
century. Frost's virtues are extraordinary. No other living poet has
written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic
monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets
have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes with absolute
mastery, the rhythms of actual speech". He also praised "Frost's
seriousness and honesty", stating that Frost was particularly skilled at
representing a wide range of human experience in his poems.[30]s Frost's deep knowledge of Greek and Roman classics
influenced much of his work.
"The Road Not Taken" is an ambiguous poem
that allows the reader to
think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go it alone.
If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a decision
has to be made.Sep 3, 2020
Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of
Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly
interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually
contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a
choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision
which he or she supposes "made all the difference." However, Frost
creates enough subtle ambiguity in the poem that it's unclear whether the
speaker's judgment should be taken at face value, and therefore, whether the
poem is about the speaker making a simple but impactful choice, or about how
the speaker interprets a choice whose impact is unclear. The Road Not Taken” Summary
The speaker, walking through a forest whose leaves have
turned yellow in autumn, comes to a fork in the road. The speaker,
regretting that he or she is unable to travel by both roads (since he or she
is, after all, just one person), stands at the fork in the road for a long
time and tries to see where one of the paths leads. However, the speaker
can't see very far because the forest is dense and the road is not straight.
The speaker takes the other path, judging it to be just as
good a choice as the first, and supposing that it may even be the better
option of the two, since it is grassy and looks less worn than the other
path. Though, now that the speaker has actually walked on the second road,
he or she thinks that in reality the two roads must have been more or less
equally worn-in.
Reinforcing this statement, the speaker recalls that both
roads were covered in leaves, which had not yet been turned black by foot
traffic. The speaker exclaims that he or she is in fact just saving the
first road, and will travel it at a later date, but then immediately
contradicts him or herself with the acknowledgement that, in life, one road
tends to lead onward to another, so it's therefore unlikely that he or she will
ever actually get a chance to return to that first road.
The speaker imagines him or herself in the distant future,
recounting, with a sigh, the story of making the choice of which road to
take. Speaking as though looking back on his or her life from the future,
the speaker states that he or she was faced with a choice between two roads and
chose to take the road that was less traveled, and the consequences of that
decision have made all the difference in his or her life.
In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker describes him
or herself as facing a choice between which of two roads to take. The speaker's
choice functions as an extended metaphor for all the choices that the
speaker—and all people—must make in life. Through the speaker's experience, the
poem explores the nature of choices, and what it means to be a person forced to
choose (as all people inevitably are).
The poem begins with the speaker recounting the experience
of facing the choice of which road to take. The speaker's first emotion is
"sorrow," as he or she regrets the reality that makes it impossible
to "travel both" roads, or to experience both things. The poem makes
clear that every choice involves the loss of opportunity and that choices are
painful because they must be made with incomplete information. The speaker
tries to gather as much information as possible by looking "down one
[road] as far as I could," but there is a limit to what the speaker can
see, as the road is "bent," meaning that it curves, leaving the rest
of it out of sight. So the speaker, like anyone faced with a choice, must make a choice, but can't
know enough to be sure which choice is the right one. The speaker, as a result,
is paralyzed: "long I stood" contemplating which road to choose.
The speaker does eventually choose a road based on which one
appears to have been less traveled, but the poem shows that making that choice
doesn't actually solve the speaker's problem. Immediately after choosing a
road, the speaker admits that the two roads were "worn... really about the
same" and that both roads "equally lay" without any leaves
"trodden black" by passersby. So the speaker has tried to choose the
road that seemed less traveled, but couldn't tell which road was actually less traveled. By making
a choice, the speaker will now never get the chance to experience the other
road and can never know which
was less traveled. The speaker hides from this psychic pain by announcing that
he or she is just saving "the first [road] for another day!" But, again,
reality sets in: "I doubted if I should ever come back." Every choice
may be a beginning, but it is also an ending, and having to choose cuts off
knowledge of the alternate choice, such that the person choosing will never
know if they made the "right" choice.
The poem ends with the speaker imagining the far future,
when he or she thinks back to this choice and believes that it made "all
the difference." But the rest of the poem has shown that the speaker
doesn't (and can never) know what it would have been like to travel down that
other road—and can't even know if the road taken was indeed the one less
traveled. And, further, the final line is a subtle reminder that the only thing one can know
about the choices one makes in life is that they make “all the difference”—but
how, or from what, neither the poem nor life provide any answer.
In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker is faced with
a choice between two roads and elects to travel by the one that appears to be
slightly less worn. The diverging roads may be read as being an extended metaphor for two kinds of life choices
in general: the conventional versus the unconventional. By choosing the
less-traveled path over the well-traveled path, the speaker suggests that he or
she values individualism over conformity.
The speaker, when deciding which road to take, notes that
the second is “just as fair” as the first, but that it has “perhaps the better
claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear.” In other words, the second
road had the added benefit of being less well-worn than the first. Notably,
this absence of signs of travel is phrased positively rather than negatively.
Rather than stating outright that the road looked as if it had not had many
travelers, the speaker states that it was “grassy” (a consequence of low foot
traffic) and that it “wanted wear” (as if it were almost asking for the speaker
to walk on it). The speaker presents nonconformity as a positive trait, and
even implies that popularity can make things less appealing: the first road,
because of its popularity, lacks the grass that makes the second path so
enticing.
Despite the speaker’s preference for nonconformity, though,
the poem ultimately remains ambiguous about whether choosing the road “less
traveled” necessarily leads to a better or more interesting life. First, the
poem questions whether it's actually even possible to identify what is non-conformist. After choosing
the road that seems to have been less traveled, the speaker then comments that,
in fact, the two roads had been "worn ... really about the same." The
speaker seems to sense that though he or she has attempted to take the road
"less traveled," there's no actual way to know if it was less traveled.
Second, the poem subtly questions its own final line, in
which the speaker asserts that choosing the road he or she did actually take
has made "all the difference.” Many readers interpret this final line as
being an affirmation of the speaker’s decision to venture off the beaten path.
But note that the poem is careful not to state that choosing the road less
traveled has necessarily made a positive difference.
Further, because the poem has raised the possibility that the path the speaker
took was not in fact "less traveled," it also raises the possibility
that the speaker is wrong, and taking that particular path can't be said to
have made any specific difference at all. There is also a third option offered
by the poem, which is that the speaker is correct that choosing that road
"made all the difference," but that this "difference" was
created not by taking the objectively less traveled path—because no one can
measure precisely which path was less traveled—but rather by making the choice
to try to take the
less traveled path. In this reading, the poem implies
In “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker must choose between two
roads without having complete information about how they differ. Even after
having chosen the second road, the speaker is unable to evaluate his or her
experience, because the speaker can't know how things would have been different
if he or she had chosen the first road. In the final stanza, the speaker
imagines him or herself in the distant future looking back on this choice. In
this way, the poem engages not just with a choice being made, but with the way
that the speaker interprets that choice and assigns it meaning after the fact.
It is only when looking back, after all, that the speaker sees the choice of
which road to take as having made "all the difference."
Many people read the poem straightforwardly, and believe the
choice did make "all the difference." The poem, however, is not clear
about whether the speaker's final assertion is true. The speaker explains that
he or she chose to take the second road because it seemed more “grassy” and
less worn than the first, but soon admits that the two roads were actually worn
to "about the same" degree. By raising the question of whether there
was actually anything special about the road the speaker chose to take, the
poem further questions whether taking the second road could have possibly
"made all the difference," or even any difference at all. The poem
implies that the speaker in the future may look back and construct a narrative
of his or her life that is simpler and cleaner, and which gives this choice
more meaning than the truth would support. Using this interpretation, the poem
can be read as commenting more broadly on how all people fictionalize their lives by interpreting their
choices, in hindsight, as being more purposeful and meaningful than they really
are.
The poem can also be read in a third and more positive way,
though. In this third interpretation, the poem implies that it’s less important
whether the speaker’s choice actually "made
all the difference" than it is that he or she believes that it did. In this reading, the poem recognizes
that the speaker—and all people—fictionalize their lives by creating meaning
where there may not be any, but portrays such meaning-making not as fraudulent,
but rather as a part of being human.
All three of these different possible readings co-exist in
"The Road Not Taken." The poem does not suggest a solution to the
question of the meaning in the speaker's choice, but rather comes to embody the
question itself, allowing for contemplation of the
The famous opening lines of "The Road Not Taken"
introduce readers to the choice the speaker faces, which will become the main
focus of the poem: two roads diverge, and the speaker, unable to travel both,
must choose between them. It's important to notice that, right from the start
in line 2, the speaker reveals a sense of sorrow at having to choose between
the two roads: he or she is "sorry" that choosing one road means
missing out on the other. The speaker's struggle sets up one of the poem's main
themes—the role of choice and uncertainty in life. It also reveals something
important about the speaker's attitude towards
the role of choice in life: his or her sense of regret that one is often forced to choose, and that
choosing one thing means not choosing
another.
The speaker's regret lingers through the rest of the poem,
so that, even after he or she has made a decision, it is difficult not to
wonder about what would have been had he or she chosen the other road. One of
the core ironies of the poem is that it doesn't actually matter which road the
speaker chooses, since both roads would leave him or her with a feeling of
regret about what he or she might have missed out on. The poem's title also
speaks to this dilemma directly, not only signaling that the focus of the poem
is the road not taken,
but even implying that there will always be
a road not taken, and with it an unshakable feeling of regret over what one
might have missed. Frost himself even indicated at one point that he may have
modeled the speaker in this poem after an acquaintance of his named Edward
Thomas, whom he described as "a person who, whichever road he went, would
be sorry he didn't go the other."
In light of the choice presented in the poem's first lines,
the most obvious guiding question for the poem may at first seem to be, "Which road
will the speaker choose?" But if one keeps in mind that the speaker will
be stuck with a feeling of regret no matter which road he or she chooses, the
guiding question then becomes, "How will the speaker deal with his or her feeling of
regret at having been forced, by the demands of life, to choose one road rather
than the other?"
The entirety of "The Road Not Taken" is an extended metaphor in which the two roads that
diverge symbolize life's many choices. In much the same way that people are
generally unable to see what the future holds, the speaker is unable to see what
lies ahead on each path. Furthermore, what little the speaker thinks he or she understands
about each path at the moment of decision later turns out to have been less
clear cut, underscoring the impossibility of predicting where one's life
choices will lead. Just as there are no "do-overs" in life, the
speaker acknowledges (in lines 2-3 and 14-15) that he or she can only travel
one road, and will not be granted the chance to "come back" and try
another route. In these ways, the diverging roads in the poem symbolize all of
life's choices—the confusion of having to make choices in the moment, the
painful impossibility of foreseeing their consequences, and the sense, when
looking back, that those choices defined your life, even when you can't know in
what way, or even whether they did at all.
The entirety of "The Road Not Taken" is an extended metaphor in which the road "less
traveled" symbolizes the path of nonconformity. The speaker, when trying
to choose which road to take, looks for the road that seems less worn. At the
end of the poem, the speaker asserts that choosing the road less traveled
"has made all the difference"—the suggestion being that he or she has
led a life of nonconformity, and is happier because of it. However, the status
of the road less traveled as a symbol of nonconformity is complicated somewhat
by the fact that the poem makes it clear that the speaker has no way of
actually knowing whether the road he or she chose was really the road less
traveled: both roads, after all, are "worn...really about the same."
This, in turn, raises questions about the speaker's notions of individualism
and nonconformity, suggesting that these ideals may not be as easily definable
as the speaker of the poem thinks. In this way, the road less traveled is as
much a symbol of nonconformity as it is a symbol of the
"The Road Not Taken" is an example of an extended metaphor in which the tenor (or the thing being spoken
about) is never stated explicitly—but it's clear that the poet is using the
road less traveled as a metaphor for leading an unconventional way of life. The
entire poem, then, is an extended metaphor in which the fork in the road
represents all of the many choices one faces in life.
As with all extended metaphors, this one contains many
smaller metaphors inside it. The bend in the
road that the speaker describes in line 5 may be read as a metaphor for
people's inability to comprehend the consequences of their decisions before
they make them. The speaker's realization that, despite his or her initial
impressions, the two roads are in fact equally untraveled (lines 9-12) may be
interpreted within the context of the extended metaphor to mean that everyone's
life is unique, no matter what path one chooses.
Frost uses this extended metaphor to argue that life is full
of moments in which one is forced to decide between two or more alternatives
without complete information about what each choice entails, while the
speaker's attempts to rationalize his or her decision in the moment, and to
assign it meaning after the fact (as described in the last stanza), mirror the
ways in which all people attempt to rationalize and make meaning out of the
choices they make in life.
"The Road Not Taken" is an example of formal verse (meaning that it rhymes and
has a strict meter), but it doesn't adhere to any specific poetic form (such as
a sonnet) that dictates, for instance, how
many lines a poem must have.
"The Road Not Taken" is a 20-line poem made up of
four quintains (five-line stanzas). The four stanzas loosely
correspond to the four stages of the speaker's engagement with the decision
which the poem takes as its subject: weighing the different
options; choosing to take the road less traveled; realizing the
decision-making process was flawed; and finally, attempting to make
sense of the experience despite this.
"The Road Not Taken" is written in loose iambic tetrameter,
meaning that each line mostly consists of iambs (unstressed-stressed) and has roughly eight
syllables. However, Frost frequently substitutes anapests (unstressed-unstressed-stressed) for iambs throughout the
poem. For instance, in the poem's first stanza, each line contains three
iambs and one anapest:
Two roads diverged in
a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Note that in the above, the order of iambs and anapests
differs from line to line. For instance, the first line goes iamb-iamb-anapest-iamb,
while the second goes iamb-anapest-iamb-iamb.
Frost's approach to meter is artful but not strict, lending
the poem a pleasing rhythm while still allowing for him to employ an informal,
reflective tone that doesn't feel artificial because of an unnaturally
consistent pattern of stresses.
Frost's use of iambs also lends the poem a steady rhythm of
walking (step-step step-step), helping to capture the
experience of the speaker's walk through the woods in the sound of the words.
"The Road Not Taken" is typical of Frost's work in
that he tended to use traditional meters in his poems, but adhered to those
meters loosely rather than strictly.
"The Road Not Taken" follows a
strict ABAAB rhyme scheme.
In addition to the poem's regular use of end rhyme, it also makes irregular use
of assonance. The vowel sound /ah/ (as in the
word "and") repeats throughout lines 6-12, adding to the pleasing
musicality of the verse.
While it was not out of the ordinary for Frost to use strict
rhyme schemes of the sort present in "The Road Not Taken," it also
wasn't universal—sometimes his use of rhyme could be erratic.
“The Road
Not Taken” Speaker
The speaker of "The Road Not Taken" is anonymous
and has no specified gender. While it's possible to argue that Frost himself is
the speaker, there isn't definitive evidence that that is the case—and in fact,
there is evidence to suggest that Frost may have based the speaker in this poem
on his acquaintance Edward Thomas, whom Frost described as "a person who,
whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other." Further,
there is an ironic distance between what the
speaker is saying in the poem and what the poem itself seems to be saying,
further implying that Frost is not the same as the speaker.
The speaker, faced with a seemingly insignificant decision
between two roads, makes a choice to follow the one that appears less
worn—seemingly an argument against conformity—and then spends the rest of the
poem reflecting on the decision. The poem ends with the speaker imagining him
or herself in the distant future, reflecting back on the decision and
believing that taking the road "less traveled [...] has made all the
difference." The poem's ending reveals the speaker to be deeply concerned
with the ways in which even small decisions may have far-reaching implications.
However, by acknowledging in lines 9-12 that his or her decision was
based on incomplete information, the speaker also acknowledges that the consequences
of these decisions can rarely be predicted or controlled, and that it's often
difficult to understand the meaning of one's choices in a broader context, even
a long time after those decisions have been made.
The Road
Not Taken
The poem takes place in a forest in autumn, after the
leaves have begun to change color. More specifically, the poem takes place at a
spot in the woods at which a road forks into two. The two roads
continue on from the fork, but the roads soon pass out of sight as they
wind and bend in the undergrowth of the forest. A person standing at the fork
can see that one of the roads is a bit grassier than the other, but
they are equally strewn with freshly fallen leaves, and in truth both
roads appear to be about equally worn.
However, while it's accurate to say that the poem is set in
a forest, it is equally accurate to say that the poem is set in the speaker's
mind. Throughout the first three stanzas, the speaker is remembering the
forest, the fork in the road, and making the decision to choose one rather than
the other. And in the fourth and final stanza, the speaker imagines him or
herself even further into the distant future, and looking back from that
vantage in time to the moment of choosing the road in the wood.
This dual setting fits with the way that the poem seems to
describe the speaker's straightforward decision about taking the less worn road
in a wood, and also
the way that the poem functions as an extended metaphor in which the speaker attempts
to come to terms with a choice he or she made in the past.
Although Frost was an American poet, many of his earliest
poems were written and published in England between 1912 and 1915. Frost didn't
associate himself with any particular poetic school or movement, but when he
began to publish work more widely in the United States in 1915—still very early
in his career—the imagist poets were instrumental in helping to promote his
work. Ezra Pound, for instance, favorably reviewed one of Frost's early
collections (A Boy's Will),
saying that Frost's style "has just this utter sincerity." Frost's
poetry might also be broadly considered to be modernist.
"The Road Not Taken" appeared in 1916 as the first
poem in a collection titled Mountain
Interval. Mountain
Interval, and "The Road Not Taken" along with it, were
regarded as a turning point in Frost's career, marking a shift from his earlier
poems (that were largely dramatic monologues or dialogues) to poems that were,
as the Poetry Foundation describes them, "brief meditation[s] sparked by
an object, person or event."
As in many of Frost's later poems, "The Road Not
Taken" takes place in a pastoral setting in which the characters' actions
take on symbolic significance to illustrate some general truth about human
life. In a time when many of his contemporaries were turning away from the
traditional verse practices of the 19th century, Frost was markedly more
conservative in his technique, always using traditional meters. He was
influenced by 19th-century Romantic poets (such as Keats) in both his subject
matter and his thinking about craft, but he made his poems feel distinctly
modern through his use of colloquial and everyday speech.
Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken" at the start of
World War I, just before returning to the United States from England. As a poem
about the impossibility of understanding the significance of one's life
choices, "The Road Not Taken" can be read in the context of Frost's
personal life, as he moved his family overseas, just as easily as it can be
read in the context of world history, with a global war suddenly and
unexpectedly erupting and upending people's lives. Take, for example, the case
of Frost's friend, Edward Thomas, after whom Frost reportedly modeled the
speaker of "The Road Not Taken." Thomas, after reading an advance
copy of Frost's poem, decided to enlist in the army and died two years
thereafter.
"The Most Misread Poem in
America" —
An insightful article in the Paris Review, which goes into
depth about some of the different ways of reading (or misreading)
"The Road Not Taken."
Robert Frost reads "The Road Not
Taken" —
Listen to Robert Frost read the poem.
Book Review: "The Road Not
Taken," by David Orr — Those looking for an even more in-depth treatment of the
poem might be interested in David Orr's book, "The Road Not Taken: Finding
America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong."
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
It was a scenario that every psychiatrist has learned to
dread. You are in an office with somebody who is telling you that he or she has
no reason or desire to live any longer. On one occasion when that happened, I
was in-session with a woman roughly my own age. She was highly accomplished,
well-liked by family and colleagues and, to an outsider, would certainly have
seemed to have everything to live for. Yet, as we spoke about her feelings of
depression and hopelessness, none of that seemed reason enough to stay alive.
She had preselected a site in downtown Washington DC where she could drive off
a bridge without her seatbelt on and have an accident that was sure to kill her
and nobody else. What could I say to her to make a difference? It might seem
strange that I would think about this person in connection with Robert
Frost’s classic
lyrical poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Here
is 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.
‘Stopping by Woods on
a Snowy Evening’ is, after ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost’s best-known
and best-loved poem. (Frost himself called it ‘my best bid for remembrance’.)
It seems a rather
straightforward poem, but, as with that other Frost poem, its simplicity is
only on the surface, and is belied here by several things, including the
sophisticated rhyme pattern Frost employs. Before reading our analysis, we
recommend reading ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, which you can
find here.
‘Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening’: summary
‘Stopping by Woods on
a Snowy Evening’ is easy enough to summarise.
Frost passes some
woods one evening during winter, and tells us that he thinks a man who owns the
woods lives in the village some distance away. So the owner will not notice
Frost stopping by to observe the snow falling upon the trees.
Next, Frost tells us
that his horse probably thinks it odd that its rider has chosen to stop here,
with no farmhouse around. What, surely they can’t bed down for the night here?
As if registering its disbelief, the horse shakes its harness-bell as if to
prompt an explanation from Frost. Everything else is silent around them, apart
from the soft wind and the slight sound of snowfall.
Frost concludes
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by telling us that, lovely, dark, and
inviting as the woods are, he has prior commitments that he must honour, so he
must leave this place of peace and tranquillity and continue on his journey
before he can sleep for the night.
‘Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening’: analysis
See? ‘Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is easy enough to summarise or paraphrase. But this
only goes so far in telling us what the poem means.
To interpret and
perceive its deeper meaning, we need to consider the wider context of the poem,
and what Frost is saying about the value of ‘stopping by
woods on a snowy evening’ (why woods, and why snow, why the evening? and so
on).
Everything is filled
with a significance at once endorsed and belied by the poem’s language and
Frost’s direct, matter-of-fact description of the scene.
The poem, if you will,
wears its Romanticism lightly – but it is a Romantic poem,
even while it is at the same time aware of the difficulties of Romantic awe in
a modern, twentieth-century world (the poem was first published in 1923).
Consider that first
stanza, as an example. It seems casual, setting the scene much as we might
expect a poet to set about doing after the expectations generated by that
title, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’.
Yet it also reminds
us that even our most seemingly pure encounter with the realness of
nature is one mediated through an equally real world of economic and legal
arrangements: these woods are not just ‘nature’, they are owned by someone who
has every legal right to consider Frost a trespasser.
It’s as if Frost is
transgressing merely by stopping to do something as weird as admire the beauty
of the natural scene, the snow falling on the trees. Shouldn’t he be hurtling
through as quickly as he can? Hasn’t he, like everyone else in the busy
workaday world, got somewhere to get to?
Any analysis of
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ should attend to the highly unusual and
controlled rhyme scheme that Frost uses. For he doesn’t just employ a rhyme
scheme: he links each stanza to the next through repeating the same rhymes at
different points in the succeeding stanza.
So, although we might
say ‘the rhyme scheme of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is aaba’
(an unusual rhyme scheme in itself, which Frost borrowed from the Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam), that only goes so far towards acknowledging the
intricate way in which the stanzas are linked together. So in the first stanza,
we get aaba (know … though … here … snow), but in the second
stanza, we get bbcb (queer … near … lake … near); and then,
in the third stanza, the ‘lake’ rhyme is shifted to become the ‘main’ rhyme, so
we get ccdc (shake … mistake … sweep … flake).
In other words, the
rhyme in the third line of each stanza becomes the rhyme of the first, second,
and fourth lines in the next stanza. This lends the poem a sense of forward
momentum, but at the same time, an air of inevitability, even world-weariness:
this is not exactly an epiphanic moment, and the only openly affirmative
statement (‘The woods are lovely’) is undercut immediately by the inevitable
‘But…’ (‘But I have promises to keep’).
But of course, this
cannot go on indefinitely, and in the final stanza, the third line ends with
the same rhyme as the other three lines, so we get deep … keep … sleep … sleep.
Such repetition-as-rhyme – what I have called homorhyme in a
study of modernist poetry (The Great
War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem
) – conveys a sense of stasis, an
inability to move on psychologically.
This is obviously at
odds with what Frost is saying in this final stanza: namely,
that he must get riding again and leave this peaceful, lovely scene behind.
As Terry Eagleton
brilliantly puts it in an analysis of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ in
his How to
Read a Poem, this is ‘rather like someone
trying to shake himself out of the paralysis of sleep with the thought that he
should get up.’
There’s also Frost’s
use of regular iambic tetrameter throughout the poem, and his choice to
end-stop each line: there’s no enjambment, there are no run-on lines, and this
lends the poem an air of being a series of simple, pithy statements or
observations, rather than a more profound meditation.
There’s something
inevitable about it: it’s less a Wordsworthian ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ than
a more modern acknowledgment that most of us, as W. H. Davies put it in another poem from around this time, ‘have no
time to stand and stare’ at nature. All we can do is snatch the odd moment,
before someone (or something, even our horse) quietly suggests we might get
back to what it is we’re supposed to be doing.
‘Stopping by Woods on
a Snowy Evening’, then, is a much more complex poem than it first appears,
making a careful analysis of how its language and rhyme pattern work together
essential to understanding its meaning.
Robert Frost
Robert Frost
(1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth
century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his
contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a
modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and
less obscure poetic language. He famously observed of free verse, which was
favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net
down’.
Many of his poems are
about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of
his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). Elsewhere, he
was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But
Outer Space’, for example.
Robert Frost was
invited to read a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961. However,
as he prepared to read the poem he had written specially for the occasion, ‘For
John F. Kennedy His Inauguration’, Frost found he was unable to read the words
of his poem on the paper, so bright was the glare of the sun. So instead, he
began to recite one of his earlier poems, from memory: ‘The Gift Outright’.
Most critics agree that ‘The Gift Outright’ is a superior poem to the
inauguration poem Frost had written, and ‘The Gift Outright’ is now more or
less synonymous with Kennedy’s inauguration.
Sources:
·
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_poems_by_Robert_Frost
·
Frost, Robert (1995).
Poirier, Richard; Richardson, Mark (eds.). Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. The Library of America. 81. New York: Library of America. ISBN 1-883011-06-X.
