How to mangle a poem

I was looking out into the darkness. It was about ten o’clock and snow was coming down steadily. Almost embarrassed, I began to recite Robert Frost’s poem like the fourteen year old girl I once was. But I had to prepare a class for my students in 400 level English and all I could do was mouth Frost’s words. How to bring the words into the realm of reciters like myself? I would ask them all to describe what was going on in the sixteen lines of pure simplicity. They would submit their ideas and I… well, who knows what I would do with them?

Anyway, this is the story of how I tried to present a poem too often read and how the results were less than perfect.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

Sorting through the students’ writing, I’ve found some things of interest, and am copying them here:

The speaker thinks he knows who owns the woods? Just thinks? Yet he knows where the owner of the woods lives in the village? Is it normal to live in a village while having a lot filled with trees on the outskirts? What are the trees (going to be) used for?

Speaking of which, where is the speaker coming from and where is he headed? Or is he permanently stopped in the middle of a snowfall? Woods filling up with snow? How many inches is that?

How can the speaker see what’s going on? Does he have some sort of light? Must have, or are the moon and stars exceptionally bright this evening? It’s very hard identify anything here, other than the fact that there’s a person, unaccompanied, who has stopped or is stopping, to watch snow falling on and among trees. Only this, and nothing more, as another poet once said. Stopping, I’d say, not stopped.

Is the person avoiding going home or trying not to think about the place just left? Is it a man or a woman? Could a woman be out alone in the evening? Is there any chance she’s a midwife who has just been attending a birth? Or a kind woman like the mother in Little Women who insists on caring for an entire family that has fallen ill? Far too often we forget to ask passersby where they have been and think only where they might be going. We forget (ironically) that past is as important as present or future.

The speaker seems to care about the horse and recognize it’s not lacking in intelligence. It knows the normal thing is to end up in a warm shelter, be it a house or a stable. But if it’s dark, how does the speaker know there’s no farmhouse nearby? One assumes there are no street lamps. Also, knowing there’s no farmhouse means knowing the route, means having traveled it previously.

Why does the horse shake his harness? Is he nervous or just trying to get warm, to get the snow out of his eyes? Or is there something else? One keeps coming back to the fact that the driver believes the horse knows things, is aware of their circumstances, including the fact that his owner could be mistaken. Does the animal fear something is wrong? Woods filling up with snow. And?

Between the woods and frozen lake. (One student wrote) Something is off about this. Trees on one side, a lake on the other, so is there a road that runs between the two or has the traveler gone off the beaten path? If the lake is frozen, it must be winter and the snow is not an autumn surprise or a spring blast that sometimes happens in New England and destroys the vulnerable buds on trees and in gardens.

The traveler doesn’t refer to having driven from any specific place, either. He or she is simply there, in a space with almost no coordinates except for lake and forest. Why? He seems, in this moment, to have no place of origin, no purpose in life. He is merely a watcher of woods, a sentinel to snowflakes. He serves merely to sketch o scene with no meaning.

And that is it: the traveler, who has stopped traveling for a moment, is a mark on a blank page, claiming a place on it.

The only other sound’s the sweep/of easy wind and downy flake. Granted, the bells on the little horse’s harness would provide strong punctuation in the stopping place where no other living beings appear to be present, but an ‘easy wind’ in late evenings would seem rare. Blustery would seem more likely, wouldn’t it? Moreover, who can hear the sound of snow fall? The heaviest precipitation in the form of snow and only aspire to create a sound. Perhaps that’s part of the traveler’s role: to watch so intently that the fragments of frozen water begin to transmit the should of comfort or coverlet, of the ambition to see the earth laden with the cold joy of fallen flakes. It is a huge task to fill up an entire area of trees, dodging in and around branches, dry old leaves, needles.

Do we know what kind of trees the poem portrays? It’s easy to think they are pines or firs, ever green and able to support considerable weight from a snowfall still apparently in progress. One notes that if the woods are filling up, so must be occurring with paths and roadways. Yet if they are not the conical pines, what can the woods be at this time of year? Maples, birches, poplars have different sounds, clacking in the winter gusts, chattering displeasure to the wind. They have opinions. They are far from stoic.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. Lovely but dark. Is the blackness, that thing that renders us either blind or visionaries, what makes them attractive to the observer? Doesn’t the darkness make it hard to distinguish bark, branches, piles of snow where branches meet the trunks? Is that blindness ours, or is it an entryway to the world defined by the collection of trunks? Where does the black reside?

Vertical defiance of an urge to bend and lie down forever. Convinced that form is no more than imagination.

****

I read and reread my students’ efforts to understand a poem that has haunted me since the first time I read it, and I want to weep, maybe, or write it out in five different colors of ink: black (of course), white, dark green, Payne’s gray, and another color without a name. Write it in a damaged longhand, on every sheet of paper possible, then bind them in a journal I can carry around with me forever, writing notes in the margins or just rewriting lines from the poem.

But I have promises to keep, or perhaps not, perhaps all the promises have been made, kept, or broken, or forgotten, or simply no longer necessary. The traveler seems rather unlikely to have promises, seems to come from nowhere and be headed nowhere. His or her only purpose is to guide us from a point in the middle of everything, the middle of a life, to help us look at the trees and the snow and the frozen lake where nobody can commit suicide because its water is solid. Look at the darkness. Hear the harness bells. Be in a place in between and not have a place of refuge nearby.

The most alone place in the world, snowed over with the white silence of knowing it exists yet is not destiny. This is what the poem tells us: we are nowhere without our promises. They are the reason.

This is why I cannot help reciting the sixteen lines as I celebrate more than four decades in Maine, where it snows often and trees abound.