Most poetic analyses, especially from people who frankly are a lot like me, feel like the kind of autopsy in which whoever murdered the poem on your desk took you with it. This poet wrote what you’re about to read to describe the feeling of wishing it would. The poem’s so cliche that I considered picking a different one, but after revisiting some insights from the writer Mary Oliver’s dissection of it in her book “A Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Understanding and Writing Poetry,” given Oliver’s status as one of the most accessible and brilliant nature poets out there, I admitted to myself that this was the poem for the moment we’re in.
If “The Road Not Taken” is Robert Frost’s easiest poem to misunderstand—and it is—and “Mending Wall” is his second—and it is—then “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” to a literal audience at least, is the bronze medalist. So I establish right now that this analysis will basically never involve nature. The poem goes:
The world is inexhaustible, and living in it is exhausting. Frost saw the Spanish Flu tear through bad hospitals and worse sanitation. He lived with the knowledge that Armenians being slaughtered by an empire that itself was dying didn’t stop the sun from burning or his feet from walking. He saw a generation of young men cough up their corpse lungs at the Somme, technology begetting cruelty as it always does. If he had surrendered—if anyone had surrendered—he couldn’t have been faulted.
But he had “promises to keep.”
For a long time, I read that line ironically. I thought that he would stay in the dark until it took him; if he couldn’t feel hope, he could at least feel snow. Now, I’m not so sure.
“Know/though/were/snow,” the first standa’s lines end. AABA. “Queer/near/lake/year,” ends the second’s. BBCB. The only stanza with a consistent rhyme is the last one. An old breathing exercise for panic attacks goes, “in for four seconds, hold for seven, out for eight.” The final repetition is the longest and the most grounding.
If he couldn’t keep hoping, he could at least keep riding.
“Stopping by Woods” also makes a point that can only exist when it’s spoken; the consonant sounds themselves symbolize the moments of our narrator’s distress.
In the opening section, Frost uses “s,” “th,” “v,” “f” and other sounds that keep the breath going. He unconditionally surrenders to the despair that his trip has beat into him.
But his horse shakes the reins. The world keeps living. “K” and “p” syllables end every line. Your breath is stopping. Your awareness of your mouth and lungs spreads to the rest of your body and then moves out. The process is a little unstable, but the narrator’s blood is slowly coming back to him.
The last stanza might be the most conflicted. He’s wrestling with something. He’s tired of wrestling. All the lines stop you, but they stop you with the same syllable. There’s nothing easy about the ride he is about to take, but there is nothing noble about stopping forever. The last line is fact: “And miles to go before I sleep.” Yes, it’s despairing: he will not rest for a long time. It is also hopeful: the snow asks him to let it bury him, but he will keep his promises. He won’t fall asleep. Not yet.
It’s near the end of National Poetry Week. This is the first story I’ve written in a while that didn’t remind me of The Horror. If you need more convincing than one poem can provide to take a breath and remember how lovely things can be, the entire Poetry Foundation website waits for you; I’d start with an essay that I read yesterday by the poet Donald Hall, eulogizing his wife and celebrating much more. The world is more complex than a ten-word news banner telling you it is ending, and that piece is a beginning point in realizing as much.
