From “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost:
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.
Kathryn Schulz thinks Frost is much, much darker than anyone suspects:
It is the greatest pan-out in the history of verse. We draw away from a man alone in the woods and see man, alone in the woods. As the scale expands, the world diminishes, becomes a snow globe, shaken. And right then, just as we are grasping the nature of our situation—we’re fine; we’re exhilarated; we’re terrified—Frost has the balls to vanish.
But he brought us here in the first place! He said we were about to head home!—but no. We are stopping here. We are midway through our journey, no Virgil, no nothing, alone, and this place we are in (like this poem we are in) is lovely. And it is dark. And it is deep. Translation: We are lucky to be here; we are sane to be scared; we are not getting out anytime soon. In point of fact, we are not getting out at all. Not in this lifetime, anyway. We will never be out of these woods.
Update from a reader:
As a poet, as someone who taught poetry, as someone who taught about commas in series, and phrases in apposition, nothing infuriates me more in poetical interpretation than the take that Frost's poem has some sort of dread written into it.
Okay, first of all people who want to interpret Frost's poem as one suggesting dread, do not seem to have ever stopped by snowy woods on an evening going home. What? he's going to sit there all night? What? Has no one ever stopped to smell the roses? The roses' aroma is lovely, dark and deep, but I'm not gonna keep my nose in them forever. The guy is going home. He stops because he's taken by the awesome, gracefully beautiful scene – snow falling in woods – at dusk. Have you ever seen it? Or just listened – the sweep of easy wind and downy flake (now last night where I live there were huge peals and shocks of thunder – that might inspire some dread, but easy wind? downy flake?).
Then there is the issue of the phrase "dark and deep." When Frost's editor saw the line written out, "lovely, dark and deep," he thought that Frost had erred in omitting a comma between dark, and deep, in re the academic rule for three or more items in a series; ie. he changed it to "lovely, dark, and deep." Later, going through Frost's notebooks another editor, deciding that Frost used punctuation consciously consistently, changed the punctuation back to the way Frost had originally written it. A whole generation by then had attached a negative connotation to the woods being dark, deep – oooh-oooh oooh-oooh. And with the new edition, the interpretation was compounded because a poet who was then quite renowned wrote an essay saying the original punctuation compounded this eerieness by making us say aloud dark and deep without the pause of a comma. Ach! The comma is not a piece of musical scoring. It is a sorting tool, in this case sorting off a phrase in apposition redefining the word previous to it. Here again let's go to the actual experience to understand what Frost is saying. The woods (at such a time) are lovely, and how is it that they are lovely? They are dark and deep – that is their loveliness (especially when punctuated so gently by an easy wind, the falling downy flakes). But the guy isn't gonna sit there forever: that is not life! Grace while graceful is not all we are concerned with here.
One can tolerate (barely) the secondary metaphorical meaning that death by beauty is not an option for a man with responsibilities, but really this business of dread that people have with that poem is the very reason young people are turned off by poetry and its so called "deeper meanings" – it's all about death – give me a break.
("Unbalanced," by Nicole Evans and Pat Farrell via Juxtapoz)
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