“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
The poem is worth quoting in its entirety:
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.
//
First published in 1923, the poem comes on the heels of the Great War – that supposed war to end all wars, which the world would soon find out was, sadly enough, wishful thinking. That terrible and bloody conflict was fought between 1914 and 1918 by what was to be known as the Lost Generation, a term coined by influential Modernist thinker, Gertrude Stein, to describe those who came of age in the 20th century amidst a trial the likes of which was never before seen. Soldiers on both sides did not so much kill each other as butcher each other while fighting for control of land oftentimes merely yards. Upon the blow of a whistle, young men surged out of their water-logged trenches and into a hail of bullets. Cut down. Blown apart. It was a madness borne out of the Industrial Revolution. We mass produced means of death and destruction just was we mass produced widgets, and in the end, we left our once promising youth hollow-eyed, maimed, and bent. Shell-shocked. Once called Soldier’s Soul. Lost. Hopelessly lost. It is no wonder why the 1920s roared; there was not enough jazz and booze to stave off the nightmares.
Robert Frost was not a member of the Lost Generation, yet it would be difficult to deny that he was not speaking to them in his poem about a man who, with his horse, pauses in the woods on a snowy evening. The Modernist movement was, in many ways, a frenzy of new and, largely, unquestioned ideas. The ideas passed muster because they were new and not for anything else. They were avante garde and arguably reckless. Morality was a hindrance. The searching was panicked. We know how Virginia Woolf handled it. And Hemingway. And Sylvia Plath. Suicides, all. But amidst the tailspin, there was a voice, offering a different way forward.
Frost was also known to suffer from depression. He was not off that hook. However, in his poem, he seems to offer a different take on life a foot or two in the door of the 20th century. It is cold and dark. The speaker is alone but for his horse. He is unsure of the identity of the person who owns the land on which he stands. They are nowhere near a farmhouse. And the snow is falling. If it is not yet winter then the season is upon them. He stops. Just stops. According to the world’s rubric, it makes no sense to do so. But he does it anyway. A pause. Long enough to absorb the fact that he is alive and that there are still tasks to be completed, miles to walk before he can rest.
In short, he takes stock of the present. He neither seeks to obliterate the past nor frantically imagine the future. He is decisively outside of that zeitgeist. Instead, he allows a sabbath to, in effect, descend upon his life just like the snowflakes gently landing upon him and his surroundings. That is the analogy.
And the lesson?
Robert Frost, to date, is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. I have to wonder if the reason is that he was able, through his own struggles, no less, to put forth a remedy for an ailing world. When the world screamed hustle, Frost uttered stop. When the world turned up the volume, Frost hit mute. The message is one of cessation. We must halt from time to time to preserve our humanity. The world, of course, says otherwise, but evidence abounds when we don’t. The engine of progress breaks. We break. Any momentum dries up. And we lose ourselves in a narrative we were never meant to worship. That honor is for Him whose woods these are I think I know: the poem’s first nod. The One everyone else seemed to have forgotten in all the sad revelry, in all the sad surrenders.
