Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

[ET Awful]

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.

-- Robert Frost

[Shakespeare]

1. ah, one of my favorites...

Perhaps the most beautiful poem about death ever written.

[Aristus]

5. Frost swore up and down that the poem was not about death;

Instead that it was just what it seemed to be about. Many people have speculated that the repetition of the last line is a reference to death. Frost said several times in interviews that he just couldn't think of a convincing final line to echo the penultimate one, so he just repeated it.

[Shakespeare]

12. Yes, I'm aware he said that.

However, the poem is clearly open to that interpretation (aren't they all?). And no matter what Mr. Frost insisted, I'd bet he saw that interpretation as well when he wrote it.

[hyphenate]

6. I have read that Robert Frost

was suicidal, but you will never convince me of it, or that this poem is directly about death.

It is quite true that Frost most likely suffered from a mental disorder--most likely depression, but it could have been a mild case of schizophrenia (the voices he "heard" as a child) or bi-polar disorder or something completely different. There is also no denying that he was a very emotional person most of his life. But to have lived through the deaths of almost all his children, his beloved wife of 43 years, and to have lived to the age of 89 shows a man who was likely not so inclined to suicide as he was to a maudlin personality born of need.

Stopping By the Woods, to a New Englander, is a moment of respite. It is a moment when no other sounds confront the night other than those of peace and solitude. It is a moment when time stops, when the thoughts running through the head magically make it to paper, when all the world goes far away, if only for that moment.

It is a moment that we are hardpressed to find in our own time, our own society. Technology has stolen that moment away from us, and social demands make such reverie near impossible.

Perhaps Frost was thinking of all the pain and suffering in his life with his children, wife, mother and others. But it is not directly a poem about death--it is an ode to being alone in your own skin, absorbing a second in time that will never be repeated.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. My dear ET Awful.....

This poem invokes such lovely images....

It is one of my favorites....

Thank you for posting it....Was there some particular reason for you to do that?

:loveya: :hug:

[ET Awful]

3. No particular reason

Just hadn't read it in a while and ran across it today during my wanderings :)

[skygazer]

4. I love Robert Frost

I know it's utterly unoriginal but I'd love to have the lines -

Two roads diverged in a wood and I
took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.

inscribed on my gravestone. Because it fits my life so well.

[Radio_Lady]

8. I'd like that one, too -- on my tombstone. Only problem is --

I've instructed others to cremate and scatter my ashes. I don't know if they will or not (Judaism does not encourage it).

[ET Awful]

10. For a tombstone, I think I would prefer

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.

[Radio_Lady]

13. I love this poem and think of it every spring with the bright greening

of new leaves.

But I guess I'm crass enough to believe that "nothing GOLD can stay" -- doesn't really work in my family. I'm sorry if this completely does away with the meaning of the poem, but my stepdaughters fought me so violently for a particularly lovely gold bracelet when my husband's mother died in 1994 (the bracelet was a gift from my mother-in-law to my husband's first wife, who died after 14 years of marriage). Anyway, to make a long story short, I gave the bracelet up and all I ever thought of was how greedy and mercenary "gold" can make people, especially in family estrangement situations. We now have nothing to do with either daughter, after paying for airline flights, a good part of college, two weddings, getting involved in buying one of them a home, parties, birthday and seasonal gifts, and meals for five grandchildren who don't know us at all, etc. Gold means greed to me.

PS. A few years later, around our 25th wedding anniversary, my husband bought me a pre-owned gold bracelet that was made by the same company the original bracelet came from, the American Chain Company, which is now out of business. I treasure it to this day. I've told my biological daughter where I keep my gold (I really don't have that much at all) and she will administer its disposition when I pass on.

"Anything gold -- can bring out the very worst in those who stay."

[rug]

16. I was in a cemetery yesterday and saw this epitaph:

ARBITER OF TASTE

Five feet below my feet was the eighty year old corpse which claimed that title.

All is vanity.

[Radio_Lady]

7. Beautiful. I feel homesick for New England when I read that.

Not that we don't have woods here in Oregon.

[chaska]

9. Poetry lovers while I've got you here....

Any Charles Bukowski fans here? Google him, interesting character.

CONFESSION
waiting for death
like a cat
that will jump on the
bed

I am so very sorry for
my wife

she will see this
stiff
white
body
shake it once, then
maybe
again

"Hank!"

Hank won't
answer.

it's not my death that
worries me, it's my wife
left with this
pile of
nothing.

I want to
let her know
though
that all the nights
sleeping
beside her

even the useless
arguments
were things
ever splendid

and the hard
words
I ever feared to
say
can now be
said:

I love
you.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

11. Oh, chaska.....

I don't recall having ever spoken to you before....why I don't know....

But this poem of Bukowski's just went through me like an arrow into a target!

How perfectly exquisite it is.

I know someone who would benefit from reading this....

You have changed me, and profoundly. For this, I thank you.

:hug:


:cry:

[chaska]

18. Happy to be of service, Peggy...

I've only just discovered Buk. I'm not quite sure what I think just yet. There doesn't seem to be much on the web. He disliked formality in poetry - I like both formal and this style, myself. It's pretty effective, cuts right to the heart of the matter.

Here's another couple:

THE BLACKBIRDS ARE ROUGH TODAY

lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.
shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.





I just drank in this cheap room, a young man
totally misplaced in the world.
I hardly ate anything, the wine was my
substance
and the classical records.
I lived like a god damned fly, or maybe like a
confused
rat.
Where I scrounged my few funds, I no longer
remember.
But I do remember the record store
where you could exchange 3 used albums for
2.
By buying an occasional album and by continuous
trading
I gradually listened to almost all the
albums
in that store.
But most of the time I was broke so I had to
listen to very very many of the 2 albums
on hand
over and over and
over.
I drank and listened again and
again.
each note became embedded in
me
and then
re-embedded.
now
decades later
I still sometimes hear
one of those old albums on the
radio--same conductor, same
orchestra--
and I immediately
shut the radio off.
Yet remember that time with a
melancholy
fondness.

[jpgray]

14. If only reciting Frost was a road less traveled by

:)

[bertha katzenengel]

15. For Music Lovers: A Real Treat -- get "Frostiana"

seven Frost poems set to choral music by American composer Randall Thompson

"Stopping By Woods" is my 2nd fave

my first is "Choose Something Like a Star"

also in "Frostiana:"

The Road Not Taken
The Pasture
Come In
The Telephone
A Girl's Garden

Really. Get it.

:hi:

[Arugula Latte]

17. I memorized that poem when I was a kid.

I just liked it so much. (Plus, it had a horse in it, which was a big plus in my book in those days.) That's probably the only poem I can recite in its entirety from heart.

[sendero]

19. I think great poetry..

... and song lyrics are subject to interpretation by the listener/reader. The same work can mean different things to different people. The artist's intent is really not relevant.

[Alexodin]

20. My Grandfather was Robert Frost's best friend until he died.

My mother told me that she asked Mr. Frost what he meant by Stopping By Woods one morning and he answered that it was just a picture poem and had no greater meaning. Ha!

When I was a child he bounced me on his knee. I like to think that the powers of the great bard were conveyed to me through my butt. Maybe that makes me an ass of a writer. I remember as a child working as a lawn keep for Mrs. Hjort and she walked over to the hedge and pulled out an ancient pair of hedge shears and exclaimed, " Oh Mr. Frost's shears" and placed them in the lawn shed when I thought they might better belong in a museum. Heh, but we are all human after all aren't we? As my grandfather once wrote at the end of his epic novel Anthony Adverse, " Please God do give us something."

[Alexodin]

21. Check it

This is my grandfather http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_Allen

The info is not too personal he has lots and lots of grandkids. I'm very proud of him and I just want you to know that when you "read your Emily Dickenson and I my Robert Frost" that it makes my Aunt very angry because nobody remembers her dad. Heh.








spell