As Arctic cold swept over swaths of the country, there was a dictum to keep in mind besides “stay inside.” Go look at the snow.
This is a simplified and much less beautiful version of what Robert Frost says in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which just came into the public domain this year. Because it was published almost 100 years ago and its copyright has expired, we can reprint it here:
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.
The poem has long been a staple of high school and literature classes at college, where many well-meaning professors teach that the iambic meter tells a story about the contemplation of suicide. But Frost explicitly rejected this view. Christopher Busch, a professor of English at Hillsdale College, says it’s about much more:
“I think here what [Frost] is really getting at is a sense of, you know, ‘up, up, old heart.’ Let’s try again, try to continue on this journey. And that really is, in a sense, the central metaphor, you might say, of the poem, which is: It’s a journey. And this is just a little slice out of [the speaker’s] journey.”
Up, up old heart — the speaker in the poem is perhaps just wondering what the dark woods may offer. He stops by the woods on a snowy evening only to experience a “crisis of will,” a desire just to stop right there and enjoy the frigid but pleasant sight.
Because the poem is a “slice” of a larger narrative, we can speculate as to where the speaker is going, why the woods seem so alluring tonight. The poem is deceptively simple, almost as soothing as a lullaby, but its ambiguity allows it to hide a deeper meaning.
For his part, Frost argued that his poems would be more explicit about their themes if they had as much to say as critics conjecture.
“[One critic] makes my ‘Stopping By Woods’ out to be a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I’d say, ‘This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.’ There’d be no absurdity in that. That’s all right, but it’s hardly a death poem,” Frost said.
Perhaps Frost wants us to work for the meaning, to enjoy his poems for their beauty but not to discover their depths unless we have the will to do so. In “Stopping by Woods,” he seems to have believed we might.
Either way, it is pleasing that this great American poem is now available for unlimited reproduction.
