How Robert Frost Wrote Certainly one of His Most Well-known Poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Night”
Several generations of American students have now had the experience of being informed by an English trainer that they’d been learning Robert Frost all mistaken, even when they’d never learn him in any respect. Most, at the least, had seen his traces “Two roads diverged in a wooden, and I— / I took the one much less traveled by, / And that has made all of the difference” — or in any case, they’d heard them quoted with intent to encourage. “ ‘The Highway Not Taken’ has nothing to do with inspiration and stick-to-it-iveness,” writes The Hedgehog Evaluation’s Ed Simon in a reflection on Frost’s a hundred and fiftieth startday. Reasonably, “it’s a melancholic exhalation on the futility of selection, a dirge about enduring within the face of implyingmuch lessness.”
Similarly misinterpreted is Frost’s second-known poem, “Ceaseping by Woods on a Snowy Night,” whose wagon-driving narrator declares that “the woods are lovely, darkish and deep, / However I’ve promises to maintain / And miles to go earlier than I sleep, / And miles to go earlier than I sleep.” You may hear the entire thing learn aloud by Frost himself in the brand new video above from Evan Puschak, guesster often called the Nerdauthor. “What attracts me in is the crystalline clarity of the imagery,” says Puschak. “You on the spotly picture this quiet, winstrive night scene that Frost conjures,” one which feels as if it belongs in “a liminal area” the place “time and nature will not be divided and structured in human methods.”
Frost evokes this really feeling “precisely by structuring time and area in a human method” — that’s, utilizing the structures of poetry. Puschak breaks down the relevant techniques like its rhythm, meter, and rhyme scheme (rhyming being a quality of his work that after obtained him labeled, as Simon places it, “a jingle man out of step with the prosodic conventions of the twentieth century”). However “the appearing simplicity of the imagery, phrasing, and structure of this poem conceal quite a lot of subtlety,” and the extra you have a look at it, “the extra you see the true world intruding on the narrator’s meditative second.”
“It’s arduous to not learn ‘Ceaseping by Woods on a Snowy Night’ as concerning self-annihellolation (albeit self-annihellolation keep away fromed),” writes Simon. In any case, why place that “However” after “the observation of the darkish, lovely closingity of the woods, of that frozen lake so amenable to drowning oneself, if solely then to reafagency that listed below are promises to maintain, miles to go earlier than he sleeps, responsibilities and duties that have to be fulcrammed earlier than loss of life will be entertained?” That is arduously the type of subject you’d count on from “the Norman Rocknicely of verse,” as Frost’s sheer accessibility led many to perceive him. However as with poetry of any culture or period, sufficiently shut learning is what actually makes all of the difference.
Related content:
How Emily Dickinson Writes A Poem: A Quick Video Introduction
How John Keats Writes a Poem: A Line-by-Line Breakdown of “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
How E. E. Cummings Writes a Poem
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the ebook The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by means of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social internetwork formerly often called Twitter at @colinmarshall.
