Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening: Robert Frost

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

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 and his horse, where are they going, seated on a horse and it passing through the forest tract? The scenery is excellent, a world viewed afresh after a snowfall or the snowflakes falling lightly and the silent world of nature draped in that silence and imagery, looking fresh, filled with snow and pleasant enough. The horse is passing, it is getting dark as has to go a long way, but the imagery is pleasant enough, quite captivating and calling upon, fascinating and charming no doubt, so mysterious and magical. The heart does not like to be detached from. 

The evening descending upon, enveloping the area and has a long way to go crossing the tract so mysterious and mystical, so lonely and man less and there lies the farmhouse where the family lies it waiting and have to go, have to go and have also to attend, attend some duty to be done for family, society and the nation which are but obligatory and one ought to have definitely but the sides of the same picture.

But the beauty of Nature as such the forest seems to be holding the hand and letting him not go just like the mariner of Coleridge holding the hands of the wedding guest and telling the tales in The Rime of The Ancient Mariner.

How strange is it to ask, whose woods are these as he thinks it so! Who the owner of the forests? But asking it he takes it for that his house will be there in the village. But will he whoever be it like to see him stopping and marking the woods that evening with the evening descending upon and the flakes falling? Would it be right to stop it here? We too are not sure of if he stops by to watch the beauty and mystery of the forest or just keeps taking a passer-by’s eye-view of the scenery and landscape.

His horse also finds it strange to stop by in between the woods and the frozen lake. Why is he slowing to make it stop? Why is trying to pull the reins? There is no farmhouse here but instead of why he wants to stop by, the poor animal appears to be thinking. The rainfall, the evening make the evening the darkest one of the year, never seen before. At this time, should one? Will it be not one’s folly? Is it not his mistake to stop here? 

The horse makes the bells shake to feel that it is no use stopping here rather than to be in motion, rather than keep going. It is sighing by, the easy sweep of the wind and the downy flake the other side.

Given the situation under, what should he do? He thinks it within to be answered back to feel it inwardly. When counselled from within, taking the soul in confidence, he gets the answer. He has miles and miles to go before he sleeps, yea, miles and miles to go before he goes way from here. He has duties to attend to, to his family, society and the nation which he has not so far and these need to be. The words are lovely, dark and deep no doubt, but he has also promises to keep.

The poet has not made it clear where are they going? Where is his place to go? Whose forest is it indeed? Who the owner of it? Whose farmhouse does he talk about? Why does he want to stop by? Whose horse is he   riding? From which place is he going where? What duty has he to do with scenery watching? Why does he want to cut short his visit?

The horseman has to go miles before he sleeps. But it is not clear, where has he to reach by? What his promises to keep? Whom has he promised to? What his obligations and loyalties? What his duties to do?

The poem is full of lovely imagery as for mystery lurking around, the snowflakes falling lightly, the evening taking over, darkness descending upon and it going to be enveloped in darkness and the poet as a horseman on horse-back passing through, pausing by to catch hold of the captivating scenery of the sight and the landscape. The horse seems to be questioning the master why does he want to stop where there is no farmhouse. But the poet as horseman the traveller lost into the thought of his own, thinking it otherwise, moved by the forest scenery draped in flakes and the wind soothing by.

The bells tinkling make us remind of the bells tied around the necks of cattle of Gray grazing upon the landscape near the country churchyard. The horse thinking about why the master wants to stop near a forest reminds us also of the horse champing green grass from the turf near the haunted house and that too under the moonlight in The Listeners of Walter de la Mare.

It is a song of America and Americanness, the American pastoral romanticism, farmhouses, snow-covered woodlands and Nature scenery and landscape.

It is a song of life and the traveller’s view of the world. The lessons of life are as thus so the ways of the world taking to. Where to go? How to keep the promises? But one must. One must fulfil one’s promises made to.

The paths of life are as such.

It is also a poem of horse-riding and scenery watching. The world of Nature is different from the world of man. How the ways of the world? How the ways of man?

The woods are definitely lovely, deep and dark and the path too crossing through the tract so hilarious full of awe and suspense as for the evening descending and darkness taking over with the scenery of the downy flake and the wind soothing by. 

The Figure a Poem Makes: Robert Frost

Source: https://martyncrucefix.com/2017/07/04/the-meaning-of-robert-frosts-the-figure-a-poem-makes/

Written in 1939, Robert Frost’s essay is combative, ironic, cryptic, delightful, damning of scholars and, for aspiring poets, encouraging of both a formal awareness and a cavalier attitude. The Figure a Poem Makes talks of the experience of writing rather than reading and the resulting poem is first described negatively (what it is not) then more positively in the famous phrases that it is a “momentary stay against confusion”, that it begins “in delight and ends in wisdom”. Along the way, Frost images the poet as giant, lover and grasshopper. Like most of his comments on poetry, the essay does not develop in a scholarly way, but there is an underlying coherence and in what follows I hope to track it down. You can read Frost’s full text here. I have also posted a discussion of Frost’s poem ‘A Soldier’.

Paragraphs 1-3

Frost opens in the middle of a battle against what he calls “abstraction”, long accepted as part of philosophic method but now – in the first half of the 20th century – “a new toy” in the hands of poets. This idea occupies the opening 3 paragraphs of the essay. It is the temptation to separate out the constituent elements of a poem and to elevate or prioritise one over all others. Frost’s faux-infantile tone here suggests he will not be offering any approval of this method (“Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? . . . Our lives for it.”). He floats the idea of focusing only on the sound a poem makes – “sound is the gold in the ore”. He’s thinking of the experiments in sound of a Mallarme, a Tennyson, or a Swinburne, the lush aestheticism of a few years before. It may also be relevant that, in the UK, Dylan Thomas’ early work had appeared in the mid-1930s.

“sound is the gold in the ore”

But Frost’s doubts about such approaches to poetic composition take a surprising form. From the premise that “the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other” he argues that a reliance solely on linguistic and formal elements (“that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, metre”) is never going to be enough to achieve this aim. If we abstract for use only the sonic and formal elements of poetry, “[a]ll that can be done with words is soon told”. Frost is known for his interest in form (as against other Modernists’ scepticism about it) so it’s with some surprise that we hear him say: “So also with metres – particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many [more varieties of metre] were still poor if they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony”.

With this Frostian chuckle, it’s clear that only monotony results from this approach and also that the poet can only gain relief from it with “the help of context-meaning-subject matter”. This clumsy, composite term is quickly honed down to the single word “meaning” (later in this essay he uses “theme” and “subject” to refer to the same thing). This is Frost’s argument against the lure of abstraction. The poet – even merely to achieve poems which sound as different as possible from each other – must have something to say, must mean something. The limits of pure sound/form can be breached once meaning is played across the sonic/formal qualities of language. For me this gives rise to images of a jazz soloist improvising across the rhythms of a band. For Frost: “The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say”.

The third paragraph opens: “Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken”. The quasi-Biblical turn of phrase here suggests irony is again at work and it is a second form of abstraction that Frost is mocking. The “wildness” of a poem is the way its component parts are related – or not – to each other. He mocks the kind of “Poem” – note the ironic upper-case – that results from those who seek “to be wild with nothing to be wild about”. Though the sudden switches of focus, the jump-cuts of strong emotion, the leaps and gulfs of epiphanic moments are certainly (Frost implies) part of great poetry, the Modern(ist) abstractionist will want the leaps and jumps “pure”. Frost is again concerned about the lack of “context-meaning-subject matter” in this kind of poetry. He is taking aim at Surrealism with its reliance on irrational leaps, its dislocation of the senses, the shock value of the illogical. For Frost such practices lead only “to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper”. To create poetry that has something to say, Frost suggests for the second time that “Theme alone can steady us down [. . .] a subject that shall be fulfilled”.

Paragraphs 4–6

The essay now moves away from the constituents of a poem to the process of its writing, a process Frost sees as organic, instinctive, unpredictable, exploratory, holistic, and – like love – an experience and source of pleasure. This is where he uses the title phrase and the figure of a poem turns out to be ‘the course run’ by the poem, its track or trail or locus. The elliptical sequencing of the next few paragraphs doesn’t help the reader but Frost considers 5 areas: the poem’s origins, its development, its impact on writer and reader, the importance of the poet’s freedom.

The delight with which a poem begins is “the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew”. I don’t think this need be a literal recalling (on this Frost is not Wordsworth) but an insight or sensing of a connection between things which has a familiarity and feels like a remembrance. (The way in which metaphor is at the root of poetry and, perhaps, all knowledge is a point Frost developed in ‘Education by Poetry’ (1931)). The substance of this initial insight is what constitutes at least the beginnings of the “context-meaning-subject matter” so essential to any successful poem. All poets will recognise such a moment as Frost describes: “I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows.” But from such momentary delight and recognition (which will be accompanied by powerful emotions, even tears), Frost makes it clear the process, the figure, of the poem’s making, still lies ahead and is one of surprise and discovery.

As the poem struggles to exist, the poet must remain alert and watchful to what may help build it as “it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events”. It is a fundamentally metaphorical process of making connections, often quite unforeseen ones: “The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time”. In a striking image, Frost suggests we are like giants, drawing on elements of previous experience and hurling them ahead of us as a way of paving a pathway into our own future. We make sense of what we encounter by reference to what we have experienced in the past. It’s in this way that a poem is able to result in “a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as [religious] sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” Our pathway ahead is illuminated, even if only briefly, by the ordering and landscaping the poem creates towards future experience by reference to what we already know.

This is why Frost teasingly argues the logic of a good poem is “backward, in retrospect”. What it must not be (and he has his earlier abstractionist targets in mind again) is pre-conceived or imposed before the fact (even if what we pre-impose is the illogical kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another). Such willed pre-conception can never yield anything other than a “trick poem”. It is not a prophecy, but rather something “felt”, a feeling figure, an emotional response involving both past and future and it must be “a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader.” The crucial role of emotion is perhaps easily missed. And to allow the role of the passions, Frost insists on the greatest freedom of the poetic materials to move about, to be moved about, to establish relations regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affective affinity. This is Frost’s answer to one of the writer’s constant quandaries: how true to the original experience must I be? For Frost, truth to the emotional response at the inception of the poem (not necessarily the original incident’s emotional charge) is key and that demands artistic independence and freedom. Some distance is required.

Paragraph 7

The essay comes to concentrate finally on the necessary freedoms of the poet. The artist’s freedom is the freedom to raid his own experiences: “All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material – the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” It’s in this freedom that Frost contrasts scholars/academics and artists. Scholars work from knowledge. But so do artists – this is the point of the early paragraphs of the essay. But the two groups come by their knowledge in quite different ways. Scholars get theirs via a conscientious and thorough-going linearity of purpose. Poets, on the other hand, acquire theirs cavalierly and just as it happens, whether in or out of books. Poets ought to “stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields”. Poets do not learn by assignment, Frost says, not even by self-assignment.

In the course of the figure a new poem may be making, the poet must assert his liberty to work in a dramatically metaphorical way, to be possessed of both “originality” and “initiative” in order to be able to snatch “a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic”.

Frost concludes with another vivid image of the poem making its figure in the course of composition. “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” The aptness of the image lies partly in the ice’s gradual vanishing (what a poem can offer is only ever “momentary”) and the frictionless quality reflects Frost’s insistence that a poem cannot be “worried into being” through pre-conceived effortfulness. The ice’s movement is generated and facilitated by its own process of melting and the poem too must propel itself (not be propelled by the artist). The resulting figure follows an unpredictable and fresh course, the links it draws from both past and present towards the future offering temporary clarifications of all three for the poet and (something Frost does not explore here) perhaps finally broadcast, available and effective for its readers too.