By Gabriel Hartley • 1-2 September 2020
[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]
Related Posts—Draft Chapters
On Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
Over the years, the Robert Frost poem I have taught the most by far is his ever-popular “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It has in many ways served me as a good way to counter some of the assumptions many readers hold concerning Frost’s poetry, including the idea that he himself promulgated, that writing poetry in free verse was like playing tennis without a net. I have also countered the common reading of the poem’s final stanza as expressing a longing for death, for extinction (or deep rest) of some kind presumably because, as he points out, the “woods are lovely, dark and deep,” and yet now is not the time for sleep. I have always seen instead a poem bursting at the seams with a kind of rebellious spirit that the rhyme scheme continually seeks to subdue. In this case, then, we have a poem that illustrates the desire to tear down the nets while operating within their limits. If there is death in the poem, it is the death of the spirit occurring once the poet-speaker decides to leave the woods—so lovely, dark and deep—and continue his journey across the miles between him and that restorative sleep that will have to take the place of his longed-for snowy evening ecstasy. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
As in my discussion of “After Apple-Picking,” I will pursue a recursive mode of reading here, by which I mean that I will pass through the lines a few different times as I point out various elements of the poem that call to me. And as with “After Apple-Picking,” I believe that this recursive engagement becomes a part of the poem itself as it unravels its various layers for the attentive reader who agrees to stop by woods along with the speaker and embrace this pause in the common run of things.
In our first run through the poem, let’s take a look as much at what is not said as what is. Take the first word of the poem, for example, “whose,” which dominates the first stanza:
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. (1-4)
We begin in media res, in the middle of things, with a possessive pronoun that suggests a world of relationships and complications that are never spelled out for us, but which give us the restrictive context driving the speaker’s desire for stopping. The entire world of the poem is laid out by the word that tells us that we are operating in a world of property relations, or, more accurately, private property relations. In Finland, for instance, where the law of Everyman’s Right (Jokamiehen oikeudet) allows anyone freely yet respectfully to roam the vast countryside, archipelagos, lakes, and forests of this mostly rural nation, the idea of a forest being someone else’s land is quite foreign. The primary conflict confronting the speaker in “Stopping by Woods”—the sense of the woods being somebody else’s property and therefore off limits—just doesn’t exist here. There is no reason to wonder “whose woods these are.”
This distinction between different national traditions regarding property relations brings me to a discussion of a rhetorical move that Frost frequently employs and which dominates this poem in particular. I will refer to this narrative gesture as retroactive ellipsis.
The term “ellipsis” suggests that in the development of a sentence or a response to a question something has been left out that needs to be assumed by the respondent in order to complete the statement. This mechanism allows us to avoid unnecessary repetition in communication. For example, I might say, “I want that apple that has been left upon some bough,” to which the apple farmer might ask, “This one?” and I respond, “Yes, that one.” The farmer’s elliptical question could be filled out as “Is this the one you want me to pick for you?” and my elliptical answer could be completed as “Yes, that is the one I want.” In everyday speech, ellipsis allows us to save time without losing the meaning we are sharing. I would add that in speech this gesture also creates a semiotic bond between speakers that draws each person into an intimate circle of sharing information. This kind of ellipsis operates on the grammatical level, leaving out unnecessary but understood grammatical parts of the sentence.
What I am suggesting about Frost’s poetry is that he uses a mode of logical rather than grammatical ellipsis. In this case, we are presented with the conclusion to an argument while the steps leading to that conclusion have been omitted. I am saying retroactive ellipsis to highlight the fact that, unlike typical grammatical ellipsis, in which the meaningful precedents have already been stated and so do not need to be repeated, the reader of Frost’s poems has never been presented with the questions which the poem’s speaker is seeking to answer. The reader must assume that certain questions had been presented before the advent of the poem and that the reader must then retroactively retrieve those unspoken questions in order to understand what motivated the answers that are provided within the poem. So Frost’s mode of ellipsis forces an attentive reader to go back and “recreate” the elements of the line of logical progression that had never previously been stated within the time-space of the poem itself (if we limit the poem to the words actually written in its lines—we might have reason to expand the boundaries of the poem beyond the actual words as our exploration continues).
To return to the first line of “Stopping by Woods,” we read: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” This opening statement presumes several unstated (elliptical) questions in order to make sense here and which the reader must retroactively bring to life to fill out the logical progression we are engaged in. The opening line suggests that the poet has previously asked himself “Whose woods are these?” before the poem even began. And this question itself presupposes a social relationship defined by property ownership, for, as I have mentioned, such a question is not always necessary in a country organized by different property relations. In an expanded social-historical sense, then, another previous question remains unasked: “What are the specific property relations of the society I am operating in?” It is precisely because of the nature of the specific property relations of American society that the speaker ends up in the particular conflict that drives the action and mood of the poem. It is only within this limited social scope that the speaker would have to ask himself whether he knows whose woods these are. “I think I know.”
Having retroactively filled out the logical steps of the first line of the poem, we then find ourselves having to continue in this mode as we move on to the second line: “His house is in the village though.” In order to understand the drama unfolding here, we have to ask ourselves several more unasked questions. First, why does the speaker care whose woods these are? If he were only wishing to sit in his wagon and watch the woods fill up with snow, this question would not arise. The speaker must want to walk off into the woods, then, for any of this drama to arise. The clue that this is the case comes with the concluding word “though.” If the speaker were only curious about who the owner might be, he already thinks he knows and even knows that, if he is right, the owner’s house is in the village. But why “though”? This word signals that another unasked question or statement is hovering in the air at this point. That question must be something like “Will the owner find me here in my wagon looking into his woods?” No, because his house is in the village. “He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.”
There are some questions that do not arise in any form here, however, such as “Why would the speaker be so worried about being seen looking into the woods?” and “What is it that drives the speaker to want to watch the woods fill up with snow in the first place?” The tension between these two unasked and perhaps unanswered questions drives the entire drama of the poem. As we have seen, the first stanza is taken up with the presentation of this drama. The second stanza amplifies the alienating reality of proper behavior in a world dominated by private property. This alienation is so deep that even the speaker’s horse is driven by it:
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. (5-8)
The topographical placement here is significant, enough so to determine the relative queerness of one’s relationship to place. Thus we confront a relationship between particular types of places that carry their own valences within the general sphere of socially-configured relations to place: woods, village, farm, lake, home (where the speaker can eventually sleep), and the road the speaker travels upon—which in the case of this poem is clearly the road more traveled. We encounter here a topographical geometry of desire and frustration. The speaker’s placement remains within conventional sanctions (as does verse with its proper tennis nets) so long as he keeps moving in the right places, stopping only when it is appropriate to do so (such as near a farmhouse). Stopping in the wrong place makes one queer within this social logic—and this might be what drives the speaker’s tendency to slip into what I have been calling retroactive ellipsis. Such things are not to be spoken of, and even the little horse knows this much. (Don’t make me give my harness bells a shake. Better to keep one’s mouth shut, perhaps.)
But there is obviously something about this particular geometry, this time-space triangulation that calls to the driver and makes him want to stop by these woods on this night of the Winter Solstice, the darkest evening of the year, between the woods and frozen lake. We can only surmise (the elliptical reticence remains strong here) that the frozen expanse of the lake plays a certain energetic role in the speaker’s relationship—in this particular spot—to the woods filling up with snow. This spot, a kind of spatial hinge-point, in some way resonates with the temporal scheme of being suspended between one day and the next, one year and the next, on this particular temporal hinge-point—much as we see in “Waiting—Afield at Dusk.” There must be something deeply alluring, perhaps even hypnotic, about this confluence of natural elements so far from farm and village and home.
But the horse is immune to this aspect:
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. (9-12)
Notice that the horse is the only one to actually ask questions in the poem. This should not be taken as a moment of projection or anthropomorphism, for anyone who has had an intimate relationship with an animal recognizes how deeply members of different species can communicate with one another (follow the bird in “The Wood-Pile“). The little horse knows deep down, through routine if nothing else, that this particular stopping is peculiar and unsanctioned. Has there been a mistake? What’s going on here? But the speaker is unfazed by the horse’s note of concern. Note how the speaker’s attention, now drawn to the acoustic level of shaking bells, slips into a deeper acoustic call: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” I would imagine that anyone who has had this experience of standing out at night as the snow softly rides the easy wind can recognize how hypnotic and alluring this moment can be—you can feel it in your bones and flesh and perhaps even catch yourself in a brief involuntary shiver of awe in the presence of such beauty as each snowflake melts away on your face. “The only other sound’s the sweep,” and we are swept away at once.
“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”
The world has opened up here and now in this Solstice moment to the silent speaker sitting at the woods’ edge. The dark and deep qualities of the woods call to the driver, inviting him to share their loveliness in the beautiful death-and-rebirth of the year, and perhaps the psyche, in this very turning point. The most life-asserting line in the poem, then, is this opening line of the fourth stanza:
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. (13-16)
But this gesture is challenged in line 14 when it presents us with the poem’s next retroactive ellipsis: “But I have promises to keep.” Why does this line begin with “but”? There is evidently another logical gap between the first and second lines of this stanza because there is nothing in the statement “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” that could call for the “but” that follows. Again, the speaker’s inappropriate desire has been truncated, suggesting a sequence such as the following: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and I would love to go into them, but I have promises to keep.” The elliptical nature of the poem’s logical progress seems to underscore the repressed nature of the speaker’s true desire, a desire at odds with the promises he has to keep. The poem’s final retroactive ellipsis appears in the final two lines, emphasized by their repetitive nature. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, and I would love to go into them, but there isn’t enough time because I have miles to go before I sleep.”
The next-to-last line, and especially its repetition in the final line, has suggested to some that the sleep spoken of here indicates some kind of suicidal desire on the speaker’s part. But given the ecstatic reception of the beauty of the woods in the lightly falling snow, this reading seems very much off the mark. As I suggested earlier, if there is some kind of death reference here, it would more likely be a death of the spirit in the face of social limitations than a desire for literal death. That spirit is offered uplift by the forest’s invitation, but the driver feels forced to pass by this restorative relationship to nature because of the promises he has to keep in these woods belonging to somebody else whose house is in the village.
As if to reinforce this theme of natural desire thwarted by social demands, Frost imposes an interesting rhyme scheme on the poem. The first stanza presents the following rhyme scheme: aaba — know, though, here, snow. Notice how “b” of the third line stands out as if in rebellion against the standardizing impact of the “a” rhyme of the first two lines. The stanza suggests that the poem itself wants to break free from routinization and arbitrary order. But that rebellious spirit is tempered by the reassertion of the “a” rhyme in the stanza’s final line. In good (or bad) dialectical fashion, however, the rebellious “b” of stanza one becomes the rule-giving rhyme of the second stanza: bbcb — queer, near, lake, year. Even so, the third line of the stanza—the “c” rhyme—again promises a breaking free from this reimposition of the ordinary. Yet as in the previous case, this “c” then becomes the dominant rhyme of the third stanza, now marked for rebellion by the “d” rhyme again in the third line: ccdc — shake, mistake, sweep, flake. A pattern of recurring rebellion in these first three stanzas suggests an ongoing if not necessarily progressive recurrence of rebellious spirit.
The final stanza, however, brings this rebel hope to an end: the rebellious “d” of stanza three now not only dominates the rhyme scheme of stanza four but also stamps out the impulse to rebellion as the third line of stanza four not only submits to the rhyming rule but solidifies this defeat by repeating itself completely: dddd — deep, keep, sleep, sleep. “Sleep” not only submits to the destruction of the previously rebellious nature of the stanza structure on the level of rhyme but also on the level of content when both of the two final lines reinforce the inevitability of sleep as a shutting down of the movement of desire and ecstatic union with nature. We can say, then, that this emphasis on sleep suggests a death of rebellious spirit, but it suggests moral resignation, not suicide. We might say, then, that the final unasked question of the poem is whether this sleep is like the woodchuck’s long and restorative sleep, or just some human sleep. The ultimate “stopping by woods” in the poem might be the stopping up of hope and desire.
On the other hand, there might be room here for a redemptive dialectical utopian reading of the overriding power of the “d” rhyme of the final stanza. Perhaps, in other words, the lack of an onward-thrusting new rhyme in the third line of the fourth stanza suggests not failure and exhaustion but rather a sense of fulfillment to come. Despair is transformed thereby into hope. In such a case, the speaker can look forward to that deep sleep in a state of unity and completion marking the state of being that is transformed by this spiritual call of the snowy woods of solstice. There would presumably need to be a few more solar revolutions before the social relations that demand our recognition of whose woods these are can be replaced by a newer social relations of integration—a revolutionary call that Frost himself claimed to reject in his distaste even for New Deal liberalism. And this revolutionary possibility arises when we expand our notion of the limits of the poem beyond its concrete statement, and beyond even the limits of the poet’s own statements, to the suppressed unspoken questions seeking expression in the same kind of retroactive ellipsis that defines the poem and now seems to take on an anticipatory character: “What kind of new year could we make room for after this solstice moment if we truly listen to the sweep of easy wind and downy flake? How deeply and restfully might we then sleep? What heartbeat pulse springs us forward beyond this restorative caesura, this stopping by woods on this snowy evening?”
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