An introduction to his work

Frost’s treatment of nature helps explain the various levels of meaning in his poetry. The familiar natural world his poems evoke is sharply detailed. We hear icy branches clicking against themselves, we see the snow-white trunks of birches, we feel the smarting pain of a twig lashing across a face. The aspects of the natural world Frost describes are designated to give pleasure, but they are also frequently calculated to provoke thought. His use of nature tends to be symbolic. Complex meanings are derived from simple facts, such as a spider killing a moth or the difference between fire and ice (see “Design,” and “Fire and Ice”). Although Frost’s strategy is to talk about particular events and individual experiences, his poems evoke universal issues.

Frost’s poetry has strong regional roots and is “versed in country things,” but it flourishes in any receptive imagination because, in the final analysis, it is concerned with human beings. Frost’s New England landscapes are the occasion rather than the ultimate focus of his poems. Like the rural voices he creates in his poems, Frost typically approaches his themes indirectly. He explained the reason for this in a talk titled “Education by Poetry”:

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

The result is that the settings, characters, and situations that make up the subject matter of Frost’s poems are vehicles for his perceptions about life.

In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for example, Frost uses the kind of familiar New England details that constitute his poetry for more than descriptive purposes. He shapes them into a meditation on the tension we sometimes feel between life’s responsibilities and the “lovely, dark and deep” attraction that death offers. When the speaker’s horse “gives his harness bells a shake,” we are reminded that we are confronting a universal theme as well as a quiet moment of natural beauty.

Among the major concerns that appear in Frost’s poetry are the fragility of life, the consequences of rejecting or accepting the conditions of one’s life, the passion of inconsolable grief, the difficulty of sustaining intimacy, the fear of loneliness and isolation, the inevitability of change, the tensions between the individual and society, and the place of tradition and custom.

Whatever theme is encountered in a poem by Frost, a reader is likely to agree with him that “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know.” To achieve that fresh sense of discovery, Frost allowed himself to follow his instincts; his poetry

inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

This description from “On the Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost’s brief introduction to Complete Poems, may sound as if his poetry is formless and merely “lucky,” but his poems tend to be more conventional than experimental: “The artist in me,” as he put the matter in one of his poems, “cries out for design.”

From Frost’s perspective, “free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.” He exercised his own freedom in meeting the challenges of rhyme and meter. His use of fixed forms such as couplets, tercets, quatrains, blank verse, and sonnets was not slavish because he enjoyed working them into the natural English speech patterns — especially the rhythms, idioms, and tones of speakers living north of Boston — that give voice to his themes. Frost often liked to use “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as an example of his graceful way of making conventions appear natural and inevitable. He explored “the old ways to be new.”

Frost’s eye for strong, telling details was matched by his ear for natural speech rhythms. His flexible use of what he called “iambic and loose iambic” enabled him to create moving lyric poems that reveal the personal thoughts of a speaker and dramatic poems that convincingly characterize people caught in intense emotional situations. The language in his poems appears to be little more than a transcription of casual and even rambling speech, but it is in actuality Frost’s poetic creation, carefully crafted to reveal the joys and sorrows that are woven into people’s daily lives. What is missing from Frost’s poems is artificiality, not art. Consider this poem.

The Road Not Taken 1916

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

This poem intrigues readers because it is at once so simple and so deeply resonant. Recalling a walk in the woods, the speaker describes how he came to a fork in the road, which forced him to choose one path over another. Though “sorry” that he “could not travel both,” he made a choice after carefully weighing his two options. This, essentially, is what happens in the poem; there is no other action. However, the incident is charged with symbolic significance by the speaker’s reflections on the necessity and consequences of his decision.

The final stanza indicates that the choice concerns more than simply walking down a road, for the speaker says that choosing the “less traveled” path has affected his entire life — that “that has made all the difference.” Frost draws on a familiar enough metaphor when he compares life to a journey, but he is also calling attention to a less commonly noted problem: despite our expectations, aspirations, appetites, hopes, and desires, we can’t have it all. Making one choice precludes another. It is impossible to determine what particular decision the speaker refers to: perhaps he had to choose a college, a career, a spouse; perhaps he was confronted with mutually exclusive ideas, beliefs, or values. There is no way to know because Frost wisely creates a symbolic choice and implicitly invites us to supply our own circumstances.

The speaker’s reflections about his choice are as central to an understanding of the poem as the choice itself; indeed, they may be more central. He describes the road taken as “having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear”; he prefers the “less traveled” path. This seems to be an expression of individualism, which would account for “the difference” his choice made in his life. But Frost complicates matters by having the speaker also acknowledge that there was no significant difference between the two roads; one was “just as fair” as the other; each was “worn … really about the same”; and “both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.”

The speaker imagines that in the future, “ages and ages hence,” he will recount his choice with “a sigh” that will satisfactorily explain the course of his life, but Frost seems to be having a little fun here by showing us how the speaker will embellish his past decision to make it appear more dramatic. What we hear is someone trying to convince himself that the choice he made significantly changed his life. When he recalls what happened in the “yellow wood,” a color that gives a glow to that irretrievable moment when his life seemed to be on the verge of a momentous change, he appears more concerned with the path he did not choose than with the one he took. Frost shrewdly titles the poem to suggest the speaker’s sense of loss at not being able to “travel both” roads. When the speaker’s reflections about his choice are examined, the poem reveals his nostalgia instead of affirming his decision to travel a self-reliant path in life.

The rhymed stanzas of “The Road Not Taken” follow a pattern established in the first five lines (abaab). This rhyme scheme reflects, perhaps, the speaker’s efforts to shape his life into a pleasing and coherent form. The natural speech rhythms Frost uses allow him to integrate the rhymes unobtrusively, but there is a slight shift in lines 19 and 20, when the speaker asserts self-consciously that the “less traveled” road — which we already know to be basically the same as the other road — “made all the difference.” Unlike all of the other rhymes in the poem, “difference” does not rhyme precisely with “hence.” The emphasis that must be placed on “difference” to make it rhyme perfectly with “hence” may suggest that the speaker is trying just a little too hard to pattern his life on his earlier choice in the woods.

Perhaps the best way to begin reading Frost’s poetry is to accept the invitation he placed at the beginning of many volumes of his poems. “The Pasture” means what it says, of course; it is about taking care of some farm chores, but it is also a means of “saying one thing in terms of another.” “The Pasture” is a simple but irresistible songlike invitation to the pleasure of looking at the world through the eyes of a poet.

The Pasture 1913

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha’n’t be gone long. — You come too.

Mowing 1913

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound —

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. Describe the tone of “Mowing.” How does reading the poem aloud affect your understanding of it?
2. Discuss the image of the scythe. Do you think it has any symbolic value? Explain why or why not.
3. Paraphrase the poem. What do you think its theme is?
4. Describe the type of sonnet Frost uses in “Mowing.”

Mending Wall 1914

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What might the “Something” be that “doesn’t love a wall” (line 1)? Why does the speaker remind his neighbor each spring that the wall needs to be repaired? Is it ironic that the speaker initiates the mending? Is there anything good about the wall?
2. How do the speaker and his neighbor differ in sensibilities? What is suggested about the neighbor in lines 41 and 42?
3. The neighbor likes the saying “Good fences make good neighbors” so well that he repeats it (lines 27, 45). Does the speaker also say something twice? What else suggests that the speaker’s attitude toward the wall is not necessarily Frost’s?
4. Although the speaker’s language is colloquial, what is poetic about the sounds and rhythms he uses?
5. This poem was first published in 1914; Frost read it to an audience when he visited Russia in 1962. What do these facts suggest about the symbolic value of “Mending Wall”?

Connections to Other Selections

1. How do you think the neighbor in this poem would respond to Emily Dickinson’s idea of imagination in “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee?”
2. What similarities and differences does the neighbor have with the people Frost describes in “Neither Out Far nor In Deep?”

Birches 1916

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay

As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust —

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows —

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone.

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk,

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What do you think the swinging of birches symbolizes?
2. Why does the speaker in this poem prefer the birches to have been bent by boys instead of ice storms?
3. How is “Earth” (line 52) described in the poem? Why does the speaker choose it over “heaven” (line 56)?
4. How might the effect of this poem be changed if it were written in heroic couplets instead of blank verse?
5. CRITICAL STRATEGIES. Read the section on reader-response strategies in Chapter 42, “Critical Strategies for Reading.” Trace your response to this poem over three successive careful readings. How does your understanding of the poem change or develop?

“Out, Out —”¹ 1916

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count

Five mountain ranges one behind the other

Under the sunset far into Vermont.

And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,

As it ran light, or had to bear a load.

And nothing happened: day was all but done.

Call it a day, I wish they might have said

To please the boy by giving him the half hour

That a boy counts so much when saved from work.

His sister stood beside them in her apron

To tell them “Supper.” At the word, the saw,

As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,

Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap —

He must have given the hand. However it was,

Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,

As he swung toward them holding up the hand

Half in appeal, but half as if to keep

The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all —

Since he was old enough to know, big boy

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart —

He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off —

The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”

So. But the hand was gone already.

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.

He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.

And then — the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little — less — nothing! — and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

• ¹ “Out, Out —”: From Act V, Scene v, of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. This narrative poem is about the accidental death of a Vermont boy. What is the purpose of the story? Some readers have argued that the final lines reveal the speaker’s callousness and indifference. What do you think?
2. How does Frost’s allusion to Macbeth contribute to the meaning of this poem? Does the speaker seem to agree with the view of life expressed in Macbeth’s lines?
3. CRITICAL STRATEGIES. Read the section on Marxist criticism. How do you think a Marxist critic would interpret the family and events described in this poem?

Connections to Other Selections

1. What are the similarities and differences in theme between this poem and Frost’s “Dust of Snow” (below)?
2. Compare the tone and theme of “‘Out, Out —’” with those of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”

Fire and Ice 1923

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What characteristics of human behavior does the speaker associate with fire and with ice?
2. What theories about the end of the world are alluded to in lines 1 and 2?
3. How does the speaker’s use of understatement and rhyme affect the tone of this poem?

Dust of Snow 1923

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. Explain why you are inclined to read this poem literally or symbolically.
2. What connotations are evoked by Frost’s diction?
3. How would you describe the speaker’s relation to nature?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare the themes in “Dust of Snow” and in Mary Oliver’s “The Poet with His Face in His Hands.”

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 1923

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.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What is the significance of the setting in this poem? How is tone conveyed by the images?
2. What does the speaker find appealing about the woods? What is the purpose of the horse in the poem?
3. Although the last two lines are identical, they are not read at the same speed. Why the difference? What is achieved by the repetition?
4. What is the poem’s rhyme scheme? What is the effect of the rhyme in the final stanza?

Connection to Another Selection

1. What do you think Frost might have to say about “A Parodic Interpretation of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’” by Herbert R. Coursen Jr.?

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things 1923

The house had gone to bring again

To the midnight sky a sunset glow.

Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,

Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,

That would have joined the house in flame

Had it been the will of the wind, was left

To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end

For teams that came by the stony road

To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs

And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air

At broken windows flew out and in,

Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh

From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What kinds of moods are produced in the speaker by the house and the birds?
2. How is Frost’s use of personification of thematic significance?
3. Why is it necessary for the speaker to be “versed in country things”?
4. Do you think this poem is sentimental? Why or why not?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare what the speaker learns in this poem with the speaker’s response to nature in “Design.”

Nothing Gold Can Stay 1923

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What is meant by “gold” in the poem? Why can’t it “stay”?
2. What do the leaf, humanity, and a day have in common?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Write an essay comparing the tone and theme of “Nothing Gold Can Stay” with those of Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time.”

Once by the Pacific 1928

The shattered water made a misty din.

Great waves looked over others coming in,

And thought of doing something to the shore

That water never did to land before.

The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,

Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if

The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,

The cliff in being backed by continent;

It looked as if a night of dark intent

Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

Someone had better be prepared for rage.

There would be more than ocean-water broken

Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. How is nature presented in the poem? How do you know this is about more than just an approaching storm?
2. What kind of sonnet is this poem? Does its form seem suited to the subject matter? Why or why not?
3. Comment on the title. What purpose does it serve?
4. Write an alternative line for line 14 and explain how your line changes the poem’s effect and meaning.

Connection to Another Selection

1. Write an essay that discusses Frost’s use of the ocean in “Once by the Pacific” and in “Neither Out Far nor In Deep.”

Neither Out Far nor In Deep 1936

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass

A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass

Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;

But wherever the truth may be —

The water comes ashore,

And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.

They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep?

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. Frost built this poem around a simple observation that raises some questions. Why do people at the beach almost always face the ocean? What feelings and thoughts are evoked by looking at the ocean?
2. Notice how the verb look takes on added meaning as the poem progresses. What are the people looking for?
3. How does the final stanza extend the poem’s significance?
4. Does the speaker identify with the people described, or does he ironically distance himself from them?

Manuscript page for Robert Frost’s “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” which was first published in the Yale Review in 1934 and again in 1936, with a few punctuation changes, in A Further Range.

The text is as follows.

‘Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their back on the land.

They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass

A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass

Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;

But wherever the truth may be---

The water comes ashore,

And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.

They cannot look in deep.

But when was that ever a bar

To any watch they keep?

Robert Frost

With the permission of the Yale review.’

Design 1936

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all,¹ holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had the flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall? —

If design govern in a thing so small.

• ¹ heal-all: A common flower, usually blue, once used for medicinal purposes.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What kinds of speculations are raised in the poem’s final two lines? Consider the meaning of the title. Is there more than one way to read it?
2. How does the division of the octave and sestet in this sonnet serve to organize the speaker’s thoughts and feelings? What is the predominant rhyme? How does that rhyme relate to the poem’s meaning?
3. Which words seem especially rich in connotative meanings? Explain how they function in the sonnet.

Connections to Other Selections

1. Compare the ironic tone of “Design” with the tone of Countee Cullen’s “Yet Do I Marvel.” What would you have to change in Cullen’s poem to make it more like Frost’s?
2. In an essay discuss Frost’s view of God in this poem and Emily Dickinson’s perspective in “I know that He exists.”
3. Compare “Design” with “In White,” Frost’s early version of it.

Desert Places 1937

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less —

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. What poetic conventions (in addition to end rhyme) are evident in the poem? What effect do they contribute to?
2. In line 5, what does it refer to?
3. What is the speaker “scared” of in the final stanza?
4. Desert in the title and in the final line probably connotes “deserted” rather than a landscape that receives little to no annual rainfall. How is the landscape the speaker observes connected to the “desert places” within himself in the final stanza?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Contrast the speaker’s feelings of solitude in nature in this poem and in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

The Gift Outright 1942

The land was ours before we were the land’s.

She was our land more than a hundred years

Before we were her people. She was ours

In Massachusetts, in Virginia,

But we were England’s, still colonials,

Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,

Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Something we were withholding made us weak

Until we found out that it was ourselves

We were withholding from our land of living,

And forthwith found salvation in surrender.

Such as we were we gave ourselves outright

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)

To the land vaguely realizing westward,

But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,

Such as she was, such as she would become.

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. Frost once described this poem as “a history of the United States in sixteen lines.” Is it? What events in American history does the poem focus on? What does it leave out?
2. This poem is built on several paradoxes. How are the paradoxes in lines 1, 6, 7, and 11 resolved?

Connection to Another Selection

1. Compare and contrast the theme and tone of this poem with those of E. E. Cummings’s “next to of course god america i.”

Perspectives on Robert Frost

Robert Frost

“In White”: An Early Version of “Design” 1912

• • A dented spider like a snow drop white

    On a white Heal-all, holding up a moth

    Like a white piece of lifeless satin cloth —

    Saw ever curious eye so strange a sight? —

    Portent in little, assorted death and blight

    Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth? —

    The beady spider, the flower like a froth,

    And the moth carried like a paper kite.

    What had that flower to do with being white,

    The blue prunella every child’s delight.

    What brought the kindred spider to that height?

    (Make we no thesis of the miller’s¹ plight.)

    What but design of darkness and of night?

    Design, design! Do I use the word aright?

• ¹ miller moth

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. Read “In White” and “Design” aloud. Which version sounds better to you? Why?
2. Compare these versions line for line, paying particular attention to word choice. List the differences and try to explain why you think Frost revised the lines.
3. How does the change in titles reflect a shift in emphasis in the poem?

Robert Frost

On the Living Part of a Poem 1914

The living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax, idiom, and meaning of a sentence. It is only there for those who have heard it previously in conversation…. It is the most volatile and at the same time important part of poetry. It goes and the language becomes dead language, the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length there is no denying. But the accent of sense supersedes all other accent, overrides it and sweeps it away. I will find you the word come variously used in various passages, a whole, half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth note. It is as long as the sense makes it. When men no longer know the intonations on which we string our words they will fall back on what I may call the absolute length of our syllables, which is the length we would give them in passages that meant nothing…. I say you can’t read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. Neither can you with the help of all the characters and diacritical marks pronounce a single word unless you have previously heard it actually pronounced. Words exist in the mouth not books.

From a letter to Sidney Cox in A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. FIRST RESPONSE. Why does Frost place so much emphasis on hearing poetry spoken?
2. Choose a passage from “Birches” and read it aloud. How does Frost’s description of his emphasis on intonation help explain the effects he achieves in the passage you have selected?
3. Do you think it is true that all poetry must be heard? Do “[w]ords exist in the mouth not books”?

Amy Lowell (1874–1925)

On Frost’s Realistic Technique 1915

I have said that Mr. Frost’s work is almost photographic. The qualification was unnecessary, it is photographic. The pictures, the characters, are reproduced directly from life, they are burnt into his mind as though it were a sensitive plate. He gives out what has been put in unchanged by any personal mental process. His imagination is bounded by what he has seen, he is confined within the limits of his experience (or at least what might have been his experience) and bent all one way like the windblown trees of New England hillsides.

From a review of North of Boston, The New Republic, February 20, 1915

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. Consider the “photographic” qualities of Frost’s poetry by discussing particular passages that strike you as having been “reproduced directly from life.”
2. Write an essay that supports or refutes Lowell’s assertion that “[Frost] gives out what has been put in unchanged by any personal mental process.”

Robert Frost

On the Figure a Poem Makes 1939

Abstraction is an old story with the philosophers, but it has been like a new toy in the hands of the artists of our day. Why can’t we have any one quality of poetry we choose by itself? We can have in thought. Then it will go hard if we can’t in practice. Our lives for it.

Granted no one but a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation, syntax, words, sentences, meter are not enough. We need the help of context — meaning — subject matter. That is the greatest help towards variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters — particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they depended on meters for all tune. It is painful to watch our sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because deeper and from wider experience.

Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it has an equal claim with sound to being a poem’s better half. If it is a wild tune, it is a poem. Our problem then is, as modern abstractionists, to have the wildness pure; to be wild with nothing to be wild about. We bring up as aberrationists, giving way to undirected associations and kicking ourselves from one chance suggestion to another in all directions as of a hot afternoon in the life of a grasshopper. Theme alone can steady us down. Just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as meter, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood — and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad — the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps going. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days.

I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than of inconsequence. But the logic is backward, in retrospect, after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader. For it to be that there must have been the greatest freedom of the material to move about in it and to establish relations in it regardless of time and space, previous relation, and everything but affinity. We prate of freedom. We call our schools free because we are not free to stay away from them till we are sixteen years of age. I have given up my democratic prejudices and now willingly set the lower classes free to be completely taken care of by the upper classes. Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow it right and left. All I would keep for myself is the freedom of my material — the condition of body and mind now and then to summons aptly from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work for knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A school boy may be defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

From Complete Poems of Robert Frost

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. Frost places a high premium on sound in his poetry because it “is the gold in the ore.” Choose one of Frost’s poems in this book and explain the effects of its sounds and how they contribute to its meaning.
2. Discuss Frost’s explanation of how his poems are written. In what sense is the process both spontaneous and “predestined”?
3. What do you think Frost means when he says he’s given up his “democratic prejudices”? Why is “political freedom” nothing to him?
4. Write an essay that examines in more detail the ways scholars and artists “come by” knowledge.
5. Explain what you think Frost means when he writes, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

Herbert R. Coursen Jr. (1932–2011)

A Parodic Interpretation of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” 1962

Much ink has spilled on many pages in exegesis of this little poem. Actually, critical jottings have only obscured what has lain beneath critical noses all these years. To say that the poem means merely that a man stops one night to observe a snowfall, or that the poem contrasts the mundane desire for creature comfort with the sweep of aesthetic appreciation, or that it renders worldly responsibilities paramount, or that it reveals the speaker’s latent death-wish is to miss the point rather badly. Lacking has been that mind simple enough to see what is really there….

The “darkest evening of the year” in New England is December 21st, a date near that on which the western world celebrates Christmas. It may be that December 21st is the date of the poem, or (and with poets this seems more likely) that this is the closest the poet can come to Christmas without giving it all away. Who has “promises to keep” at or near this date, and who must traverse much territory to fulfill these promises? Yes, and who but St. Nick would know the location of each home? Only he would know who had “just settled down for a long winter’s nap” (the poem’s third line — “He will not see me stopping here” — is clearly a veiled allusion) and would not be out inspecting his acreage this night. The unusual phrase “fill up with snow,” in the poem’s fourth line, is a transfer of Santa’s occupational preoccupation to the countryside; he is mulling the filling of countless stockings hung above countless fireplaces by countless careful children. “Harness bells,” of course, allude to “Sleighing Song,” a popular Christmas tune of the time the poem was written in which the refrain “Jingle Bells! Jingle Bells!” appears; thus again are we put on the Christmas track. The “little horse,” like the date, is another attempt at poetic obfuscation. Although the “rein-reindeer” ambiguity has been eliminated from the poem’s final version,¹ probably because too obvious, we may speculate that the animal is really a reindeer disguised as a horse by the poet’s desire for obscurity, a desire which we must concede has been fulfilled up to now.

The animal is clearly concerned, like the faithful Rudolph — another possible allusion (post facto, hence unconscious) — lest his master fail to complete his mission. Seeing no farmhouse in the second quatrain, but pulling a load of presents, no wonder the little beast wonders! It takes him a full two quatrains to rouse his driver to remember all the empty stockings which hang ahead. And Santa does so reluctantly at that, poor soul, as he ponders the myriad farmhouses and villages which spread between him and his own “winter’s nap.” The modern St. Nick, lonely and overworked, tosses no “Happy Christmas to all and to all a good night!” into the precipitation. He merely shrugs his shoulders and resignedly plods away.

From “The Ghost of Christmas Past: ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,’ ” College English, December 1962

• ¹ The original draft contained the following line: “That bid me give the reins a shake” (Stageberg-Anderson, Poetry as Experience [New York, 1952], p. 457). [Coursen’s note.]

Considerations for Critical Thinking and Writing

1. Is this critical spoof at all credible? Does the interpretation hold any water? Is the evidence reasonable? Why or why not? Which of the poem’s details are accounted for, and which are ignored?
2. Choose a Frost poem and try writing a parodic interpretation of it.
3. What criteria do you use to distinguish between a sensible interpretation of a poem and an absurd one?

Suggested Topics for Longer Papers

1. Research Frost’s popular reputation and compare that with recent biographical accounts of his personal life. How does knowledge of his personal life affect your reading of his poetry?
2. Frost has been described as a cheerful poet of New England who creates pleasant images of the region as well as a poet who creates a troubling, frightening world bordered by anxiety, anguish, doubts, and darkness. How do the poems in this chapter support both of these readings of Frost’s poetry?