![]() He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem. ![]() The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But Outer Space’, for example. Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. ![]() ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, then, is a much more complex poem than it first appears, making a careful analysis of how its language and rhyme pattern work together essential to understanding its meaning. All we can do is snatch the odd moment, before someone (or something, even our horse) quietly suggests we might get back to what it is we’re supposed to be doing. Davies put it in another poem from around this time, ‘have no time to stand and stare’ at nature. There’s something inevitable about it: it’s less a Wordsworthian ‘ spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ than a more modern acknowledgment that most of us, as W. There’s also Frost’s use of regular iambic tetrameter throughout the poem, and his choice to end-stop so many lines: there’s very little enjambment or run-on lines, and this lends the poem an air of being a series of simple, pithy statements or observations, rather than a more profound meditation. As Terry Eagleton brilliantly puts it in an analysis of ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ in his How to Read a Poem, this is ‘rather like someone trying to shake himself out of the paralysis of sleep with the thought that he should get up.’ This is obviously at odds with what Frost is saying in this final stanza: namely, that he must get riding again and leave this peaceful, lovely scene behind. Such repetition-as-rhyme – what I have called homorhyme in a study of modernist poetry ( The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem ) – conveys a sense of stasis, an inability to move on psychologically. This lends the poem a sense of forward momentum, but at the same time, an air of inevitability, even world-weariness: this is not exactly an epiphanic moment, and the only openly affirmative statement (‘The woods are lovely’) is undercut immediately by the inevitable ‘But…’ (‘But I have promises to keep’).īut of course, this cannot go on indefinitely, and in the final stanza, the third line ends with the same rhyme as the other three lines, so we get deep … keep … sleep … sleep. In other words, the rhyme in the third line of each stanza becomes the rhyme of the first, second, and fourth lines in the next stanza. So in the first stanza, we get aaba (know … though … here … snow), but in the second stanza, we get bbcb (queer … near … lake … near) and then, in the third stanza, the ‘lake’ rhyme is shifted to become the ‘main’ rhyme, so we get ccdc (shake … mistake … sweep … flake).
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