Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (Criticism)

Criticism

Jhan Hochman

Jhan Hochman is a freelance writer and currently teaches at Portland Community College,Portland, OR. In the following essay, Hochman maintains that the apparent simplicity of this popular, well-known poem invites overanalysis of its meaning.

Perhaps no poem of Robert Frost is more anthologized and studied than “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The poem appeared in Frost’s collection, New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes(1923) for which he won one of four Pulitzer Prizes. Even Frost called the poem his “best bid for remembrance.” “Stopping,” describes an unremarkable moment: a driver stopping his horse-drawn buggy to look at the woods, his horse shaking the harness bells which the driver thinks is the horse’s way of saying, “There must be some mistake,” and the driver deciding it is time to move on. It is not known who the person is, nor whether male or female. Neither is it known from where or to where the driver is going, nor why, and the promises the driver must keep also go unexplained. Finally no clue is supplied as to where this scene takes place. Here then, is a poem that functions as a perfect vehicle upon which to heap meaning, since, one is likely to think, the mere situation of stopping and looking at woods surely cannot be all there is to the poem. The reader feels compelled to read into and perhaps even overread the poem. Frost complained that the poem was overinterpreted, especially when critics remarked that “sleep” probably meant death. Still Frost should be expected of some good-natured trickery here: the poem seems deliberately fashioned to lure its readers into either a simplistic underreading or an anxious overreading. The poem itself comes to function like the “lovely” woods it describes: one is either prone to simply drive by and regard the snowy woods as if a beautiful landscape painting or photograph, or, on the other hand, tempted to plunge into the woods, become overwhelmed by the “forces” or the “deeper meanings” of the forest.

Just imagine four possible (over)readings of the poem. First, the driver contemplates the purity of life without sin (snow), but decides one must move on — spurred on by the bestial horse — before living as sinless a life as if one were sleeping or dead. Or the interpretation can be just the opposite: the reader contemplates a fallen nature represented by the woods and wants to indulge in sin, but at the last moment is reined in by the harnessed horse. Third: the driver contemplates the coldness of the snow and is tempted to give up all relationships and become a hermit, but the horse reminds the driver of another presence-in-need and the driver is reminded that a world of relationships is crucial. Fourth, the driver is suicidal since it is the “darkest evening” of the year and wants to walk out into the snowy, dark and deep woods and perish. But the living and dependent horse calls him back with a shake of the harness bells. There are, of course, many more possible interpretations, for instance, the driver resists the siren song of the contemplative life in nature and chooses a life of responsibility and activity in culture. But whatever the interpretation, the question is, if reading after reading can be spun out, what is the point?

On the other hand it can be decided that if the poem can be read in almost any fashion it becomes meaningless. Adopting one interpretation then seems like the superior way in which to come to terms with “Stopping.” The interpretation most likely to result is the one that best fits what the reader might think in a similar situation. Or, with research into Frost, one might adopt the reading that best fits with Frost’s outlook and sensibilities even if it grates against one’s own.

Problems, however, exist with either strategy. With the multiplication of interpretations, the poem turns into a runny and complicated mush. On the other hand, if only one “best” explanation is settled for, the poem turns into a thin broth fit only for fragile intestinal tracts. Instead of settling for either the overly processed concoction or decoction of Frost’s poem, it might be better to distance ourselves a little bit, study how it is the poem lures the reader into (and here I switch metaphors) either using the poem like an old, nicked-up knife, employing it for almost any kind of job, even tasks for which it is ill-suited, or, conversely, seldom “using” it, as if the poem were some marble bust on a pedestal in an alcove. Frost wished that poems would be studied more as performances or processes and less used or regarded as finished objects. This means attempting to understand why the poem has the shape it does, and contains the words it contains, all for the purpose of finding out in what ways the poem best functions. This may be the preferable solution to dealing with an object that will serve us and it better by using it as neither a universal tool nor a fragile and expensive museum piece.

Within a horizon of rather traditional formal limitation based on the number four, that is, iambic tetrameter (four beats or pairs of syllables consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable) in four stanzas of four-lines each, Frost chiselled out for “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” an ingenious form of interlocking rhyme: the third unrhymed line of the first three stanzas provokes the subsequent stanza’s rhymed sound. Further, Frost repeated the last two lines of the poem partially as a matter of form: “What it [the repetend or repeated lines] does is save me from a third line promising another stanza .... I considered for a moment four of a kind in the last stanza but that would have made five including the third in the stanza before it. I considered for a moment winding up with a three line stanza. The repetend was the only logical way to end such a poem.” What results is a satisfying presentation of traditional form with an individual variation demanded by the poem’s own structure. Upon a foundation of tradition, Frost erected a canny interlocking rhyme scheme, upon which he attached a consistent and efficient way of solving a formal problem — so elegant is Frost’s solution of the repetend for an ending, that its formal perfection is likely to go unnoticed even as it attracts us with its peaceful, sleeplike repetition. The four stanzas, the four lines per stanza with four beats in each line, and the four end-rhymes yield a kind of rational object, one made of straight lines that produces a kind of box-like or grid structure. Such a structure can remind one of conventionality, of a person who does the usual or the normal, as when someone says, “He’s square,” or “She’s straight.” Frost himself said that “Stopping” illustrated a “commitment to convention.” Form, then, appears to be reinforcing content, the fourfold structure lending itself to the driver’s decision to move on, to stop dreaming and get back to a world of responsibilities and practicality.

The first stanza sets a rather mischievous tone for the poem. First, worried that the owner of the woods might see him stopping, the driver seems gratified the owner lives in the village. Such meditations are common to an environment in which private property replaces unboundaried nature. Stopping is increasingly called “loitering,” “trespassing,” or it simply arouses suspicion so that Stoppers are self-conscious about stopping. One must, as the police say, “Keep moving,” if one is to remain above suspicion. But just when the driver has established his pleasure at being above suspicion, the second stanza establishes the horse’s discomfort. It is not the woods that bothers the horse so much, the driver thinks, as the absence of a farmhouse on the “darkest evening of the year.” This evening might be the winter solstice on December 22, the longest night of the year. With the scene being so dark and devoid of human presence, the reader might begin to share the horse’s, and maybe the driver’s, mild discomfort. The third stanza intensifies the solitude of the scene through attention to sound: the only sounds being the momentary shake of harness bells, and the ongoing “easy wind” and softly falling snow. Here the reader might be simultaneously pulled in by the increasing mystery or quiet of the natural scene and the endearing way in which the driver seems to understand or overinterpret his horse’s shake. As abruptly as driver and horse seem to have stopped, however, the driver resolves to go and leave behind this at least somewhat alluring forest, even if the series of adjectives, “lovely, dark, and deep” convey a complex mix of attraction and fear. The reasons for leaving the woods the driver offers are those very unspecific “promises to keep” and “miles to go.” It seems like the driver is reticent to give any more information. Fortunately or unfortunately, the driver’s laconic reasons are all that readers have to go on. In the end, what Frost produces is a poem that seems to hover in the zone of perfection, a poem that explains nearly everything and nothing at the very same time. In an end that never ends, the very problem with this poem is its perfection, its quality of demanding more and more discussion about something for which discussion seems pointless. As unsatisfactory as it may seem, these woods can neither be penetrated nor left behind; it is simply time to go.

Source: Jhan Hochman, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

Steven Monte

Steven Monte is a free-lance writer. In the following essay, Monte reminds us that a familiar poem is not necessarily a well-understood one, and he urges us to pause and reflect on the intricacies that give depth to Frost’s famous poem.

With the exception of “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is probably Frost’s best-known poem. As with many well-known poems, we may feel that familiarity equals understanding or that a poem we have read or heard enough times can’t surprise us anymore. This is especially the case with “Stopping by Woods,” which is not only one of the most popular American poems, but is also one written in a clear and seemingly direct style. We might even say that we like the poem precisely because of its simplicity and effortless feel. But as with a person we’ve been acquainted with for a long time but don’t really know, a familiar poem may change when we encounter it in unfamiliar circumstances. Where once we saw only surface and clearly defined qualities, suddenly we see depths and ambiguity. For this to happen with a poem, we often only need to stop and reflect on our experience, like the speaker in Frost’s poem. One of the messages of “Stopping by Woods” seems to be just that — pausing and reflecting on experience help us re-enter life with a new understanding and sense of direction.

The plot of “Stopping by Woods” is straightforward: a man (we assume) narrates his experience of driving some sort of horse-drawn vehicle by privately owned woods on a snowy evening. He stops, and then contemplates how strange his halt must seem to the horse, given that it is cold and dark and there is no farmhouse in sight. The horse shakes his harness bell, an action that the man interprets as the animal asking “if there is some mistake.” The man then listens to the wind and the snow and ends his account with some remarks on his experience, his responsibilities to the world, and the distance he needs to travel before he sleeps. The story could easily be true — it certainly aims to be “true to life” — but it is hard not to interpret it symbolically. Many readers over the years have felt that the man’s journey toward sleep represents life’s “journey” toward death, though Frost himself insisted that the last two lines were not an invocation of death. Another popular way of reading the poem is to understand the man’s rejection of the woods as an acceptance of social duty and personal responsibility.

But “Stopping by Woods” is a much stranger poem than may appear at first. From the opening lines, we know that the story is being told from the speaker’s point of view (”Whose woods these are I think I know”), but we may never bother to consider whom the man is addressing. The addressee of the poem can only be the man himself, who seems to be narrating the events as they occur to him, or thinking “aloud” to himself. This odd, subjective perspective is worth puzzling over, if only because it allows us to see just how self-conscious the man is. Why is he so concerned about being seen stopping by the woods? Is it simply because he fears he will be accused of trespassing on someone else’s property? Perhaps he feels guilty that he has temporarily suspended his business and does not wish to be seen or see himself as someone who shirks responsibility. Or it could be that he feels guilty for indulging in a fantasy, for he is attracted to something he feels he should resist. It is hard to say what the woods represent for the man — rest, death, nature, beauty, solitude, oblivion — but it is clear that he feels he should not allow himself to give in to his desire to stay there. There is moreover a sexual dimension to his fantasy: the feminine woods (”lovely, dark and deep”) are set against a world of men where promises must be kept — the world of property and business.

Whatever depths “Stopping by Woods” possesses, it gives us the impression of simplicity. How does the poem manage this? Most obviously, its language remains conversational throughout and it generally avoids twisting around the word order of spoken speech. “Stopping by Woods” also contains only one word with more than two syllables. When the poem does alter the expected word order, as in “Whose woods these are I think I know,” the sound and the sense of the line help us forget that there is anything odd going on. We don’t feel the line should read “I think I know whose woods these are” because we get the sense that the speaker is expressing the thought as it occurs to him: he is especially concerned with remembering who owns the woods, and he expresses his uncertainty by following his first thought with the phrase “I think I know.” The insistent rhythms of the poem — every line except one is exceptionally regular in beating out “ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum” — and the frequent rhymes add to the illusion of simplicity. Caught in the flow of the poem, we tend not to notice that the lines “Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year” neither follow logically from the lines that come before them nor form a complete sentence on their own. Once again, we might feel that we are listening to the thoughts of the speaker. He is situating himself in place (”Between the woods and frozen lake”) and time (”The darkest evening of the year”), where “darkest” may imply the “longest” evening of the year, December 22, the winter solstice. By calling the evening “darkest,” the man suggests that he has reached a low point or a moment of crisis.

Another reason why “Stopping by Woods” seems simple is that it is structured around many familiar oppositions. A complete list of these oppositions would be unusually long for such a short poem: man and nature, masculine and feminine, emptiness and fullness, business and pleasure, movement and stopping, society and solitude, life and death, activity and sleep, and so on. Such familiar distinctions may make us feel at home in the poem, but they may also be disturbing. The categories either seem too fixed (should we only associate men with activity and business?) or too fluid (which is empty, life or death?). Oppositions also help determine the poem’s organization: “Stopping by Woods” constantly alternates between inner thoughts and descriptions of the world outside. Even within its descriptive mode, the poem shifts from the visual details of the first stanza (”He will not see ... To watch his woods”) to the sounds of the third stanza (”harness bells ... The only other sound’s the sweep”). Meanwhile the second and the fourth stanzas are more reflective. In the second stanza, the man imagines what the horse is thinking. The details of “the woods and frozen lake” may be in the man’s line of vision, but they may also be his way of placing the scene on a mental map, just as “darkest evening” may place the day on a mental calendar. The fourth stanza is even more subjective in its description of the woods as “lovely, dark and deep.” All of this inward and outward movement and the poem’s oppositions make us feel that the man is being pulled in different directions and needs to make a decision.

But before looking at the decision the man makes in the last stanza, it is worthwhile to stop and examine some of the odd features of his descriptions. Why is his horse “little”? Why is the wind “easy” and the flake “downy”? It is not enough to say “because they are little, easy, and downy,” or even “because they appear that way to the man,” for we would still be left wondering why he chose to describe these things and not others. A somewhat more inventive if unkind explanation is that Frost needed to fill up his lines with these adjectives in order to keep the poem’s rhythm insistent. But perhaps we can do better. By calling the horse “little,” Frost gives us a sense of the small-ness of the figures in the landscape. We furthermore sense that the man is not rich and is probably fond of his animal. “Easy” and “downy” may in their own way hint at what the man is feeling. Part of the attraction of the scene seems to lie in its promise of ease and softness, its contrast to the hard world of men.

The description of the woods in the final stanza leads into the strangest and most memorable section of the poem. Why does this last stanza haunt us? It begins innocently enough and even sounds like a cliche: “The woods are lovely.” But the vagueness of the description, the pulse of the line, and the repetition of sounds (”dark and deep”) suggest that we are entering a kind of dreamworld. The drowsy repetition of “And miles to go before I sleep” completes this effect, and we sense that the poem is enacting what the man is feeling. The poem’s close feels satisfying because it deviates from, and then reinforces, patterns that the poem has established earlier. The first three stanzas have rhymes in the first, second, and fourth lines. The third line then rhymes with the first line of the following stanza, helping us feel that all four stanzas connect like links in a chain. But the established rhythms and rhymes are disrupted in the final stanza. The line “But I have promises to keep” is not as rhythmically insistent as the other lines of the poem. It also contains the poem’s only three-syllable word, “promises.” Just as the man attempts to shake off his dreamy attraction to the woods, we are brought up short with this jarring line. The last two lines then feel like a fade out, not simply because of the repetition, but due to the return of the rhythm and the absence of a new linking word: all four lines of this stanza rhyme.

The speaker in “Stopping by Woods” “wakes up” to a knowledge of what he must do. He apparently decides to return to the real world and cease his dreaming. He is leaving nature and returning to society, and in so doing makes us feel that there is some irony in the poem’s title: he was only “stopping by” nature, as if on a social call. At the beginning of the poem he was unsure (”I think I know”); at the end he has gained some kind of knowledge. We can think of the experience he has by the woods as either a temporary diversion or a recurring moment in his life that helps him go on. In this straight reading of the poem, the man’s experience, though forcing him to confront the fact of death and the difficulties of life, consoles him (and the reader) in the end. But if this moment is, or has the potential to be, a recurrent moment in life, the poem may not be as consoling as we first thought. In this dark reading of the poem, we can’t be sure whether the man has come to a decision or merely postponed it. He never actually says he has moved on and, if anything, he seems on his way to sleep. Even supposing he does continue on his journey, it is not clear that the road ahead represents a more appealing alternative to the woods. Real life may seem emptier now, and all those familiar oppositions that help us make sense of our lives are open to question. If we equate stopping by woods with reading a poem, we will confront a similar dilemma. As the man’s experience should suggest, however, it is not a question of choosing between alternatives so much as it is becoming aware of new possibilities. In looking closely at a poem, we don’t cancel our first experience of reading so much as we enrich it and make it more strange.

Source: Steven Monte, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• Henry David Thoreau’s Walden is an American classic and was one of Frost’s favorite books, which he reread often throughout his lifetime. Like this poem, it deals with a time the author left society for the New England forest, except that in Thoreau’s case it was not for a few minutes but for a few years. New editions have consistently been published since the first printing in 1854.
• To explore the directions that more experimental poets such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams were taking poetry into in the 1920s, see Stanley K. Coffman’s Imagism: A Chapter for the History of Modern Poetry. Published in 1951 and reprinted in 1972, this book scarcely mentions Frost, but gives theoretical and biographical information about his peers that makes Frost’s individualism come into focus.
• In Robert Frost Himself, Stanley Burnshaw draws on personal reflections of conversations, documents, letters, and the author’s poems to present his biography. Much of this is thorough and interesting, although sometimes Burnshaw goes a little too far to rescue Frost’s image from remarks made by the poets official biographer, Lawrence Thompson. Published in 1986.
• Cleanth Brooks was one of this century’s most respected literary critics and theorists. His 1939 book Modern Poetry and the Tradition, revised in 1967, explains the complexity of Frost’s poetry and places it in the context of the poets who preceded him and his peers.