This Robert Frost poem is accessible, has rhymes and a comfortable meter, and is coherent from top to bottom. Despite the user-friendly appearance of this poem, it is, in fact, an intricately wrought work that is a triumph of the modern poet’s craft. Paraphrasing in clear "objective" prose can help make sense of a poem.
An informational-prose paraphrase of “Stopping by Woods”
I think I know who owns these woods. He lives in
the village and will not see me stopping here to watch the snow falling in his
woods. I also think my horse does not want to stop here because there's nothing
but the woods and the frozen lake. He shakes the harness and the bells jingle,
which I think means he wants to move on. The only other sound is the light
breeze. The deep, dark woods filling up with snow attracts me, but I cannot
stay here watching because I have a lot to do before I can get home and go to
bed.
Frost’s poem and this paraphrase lead an attentive
reader—not an Easy Reader—to look more deeply into the poet’s words. Right off
you notice that the paraphrase of “Stopping” yields no take-home message like
the other two poems. Another major difference is that Frost’s lone observer says,
“I think” twice.
An interpretation based cautiously on the paraphrase
“Cautiously” means not running your own scripts so that you find the poem confirms your own views. It means honoring the words of the poem and building
your meanings on the words the poet gives you.
Here’s a cautious
interpretation:
The woods will not literally "fill up"
with snow, if “up” means to the treetops.
The speaker's concern that the owner is not
around to question him about why he is stopping implies the speaker's
furtiveness. He imagines the owner must think the speaker has no practical
purpose for stopping there unless he’s a timber poacher.
The poet believes the absence of a
farmhouse—along with the implied warmth, food, and comfort—is agitating the
horse. The horse, as a non-aesthetically responsive creature (in the speaker's
estimation), cannot comprehend his pleasure in stopping. And again his
self-awareness comes into play. He imagines his horse must think his stopping
“queer,” a word with pejorative connotations in this context.
The poet has not mentioned the quiet, but now
he notices that aside from the irritating harness bells the only other sound is
the pleasant breeze. The image words of this unprepared for observation,
seemingly trivial, are important to the significant form of Frost’s poem.
The speaker would enjoy staying longer to watch
the wintery scene, but he has responsibilities and must fulfill them
before he can rest. The word “But” in the last stanza signals a transition from
one side of the imagistic
opposition to the other.
The loveliness
of the woods, and indeed the entire scene, is set in
tension against “promises.” And not only is the loveliness drawing the poet to
postpone fulfilling the promises, it is also associated with sleep. When the poet says, “But I have promises to keep, / And
miles to go before I sleep,” sleep, like stopping by the woods, becomes something contrasted with keeping promises. Admittedly, this association between sleep and
enjoying the dark, and deep woods is not obvious, but you need to perceive it if you are going to respond to the significant form of the poem.
“Promises” is
a theme word in this poem and so is “sleep.”
Whatever the promises are,
they are bonds between the poet and other human beings.
They are responsibilities
that tie him to other individuals
(a wife? a sick friend?) and to society
in general. And that’s where the owner of the woods comes in. The owner, as a representative of society and its
parceling of the woods and farmhouses
and villages, might disapprove the speaker’s “invasion” of his woods. The owner is
thus allied with the theme of “Promises.”
That’s a “participatory” reading of the poem. It
can be extended further historically or psychologically, but doing so takes you away from the poem, not into it.
Frost was a student of the New-England
Transcendentalists and undoubtedly knew the following passage in which Henry
David Thoreau praises a generic poet’s ability
to capture the beauty of other
people’s farms without having
to work those farms or pay the owners for his enjoyment. Thoreau writes in Walden Or Life in
the Woods:
I have frequently seen a
poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that
he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the
owner does not know it for
many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable
kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the
cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed
milk.
Replace “farm”
in this passage with “woods.” The horse’s shaking
its bells to urge the sleigh driver
to move on contributes its
little bit to the property owner’s imagined disapproval of the poet’s
stopping. The property owner, that staid representative of society and the little horse do not realize the poet is stopping in order to help himself to
the “most valuable part” part of the
woods.
The reader now applies her imagination to create (or recreate?) the
ineffable bonds between darkness, coldness, a gentle breeze and soft snow flakes,
and sleep. The tension between that urge to fulfill his promises and his desire
to enjoy the beauty of this snowy evening is the poem’s significant form.
The literary critic John Ciardi, a famous literary
commentator of Frost's era, saw in those ineffable bonds between dark, cold,
and aloneness, and the way they attracted the speaker a small dramatization of
the death wish, death imagined as restful oblivion. What's important is to
sense the form that can clearly be built on Frost's words but not to become
dogmatic about their one-and-only meaning. If Ciardi’s reading appeals to you
fine; if it does not fine. More than one elaboration can be built—within
reason—on the significant form of a complex poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment