”STOPPING BY WOODS
ON A SNOWY EVENING”
Robert Frost wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" around 1921. He died in 1963, so he had about forty-two years of life ahead of him on that winter night when he stopped to admire the beautiful winter scene. During those years he became America's best-loved poet. In 1961 he was honored by being invited to read one of his poems at John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration.
Robert Frost wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" around 1921. He died in 1963, so he had about forty-two years of life ahead of him on that winter night when he stopped to admire the beautiful winter scene. During those years he became America's best-loved poet. In 1961 he was honored by being invited to read one of his poems at John F. Kennedy's presidential inauguration.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as simply a story about a weary traveler longing for the comforts of home, or even to allegorize it as the journey of Everyman, is to miss the subtle qualities that identify it as a Frost lyric. For one thing, Frost balances the onward rhythmic pull of the verse against the obvious stasis of the poetic scene itself: The speaker never arrives, nor really leaves; he is simply always stopping. Frost also arranges the natural scene so as to heighten the drama of the encounter and to reveal its symbolic density. Finally, Frost’s sense of dramatic and contextual irony undercut the simplicity of the narrative. After all, despite the speaker’s confident assurance about where he is going and the miles he has yet to go, his restiveness (projected onto the horse) and the vagueness of the future “promises” he must keep reveal his assurance to be, in a word, a fiction. This is an important point for Frost. Frost celebrated the necessity of imaginative extravagance in human affairs, but he knew well enough that the imagination traps as well as frees.
No comments:
Post a Comment