One of my favourite poems of Robert Frost seems timely, just as winter is losing it's grip.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY
ROBERT FROST
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.
"Frost didn’t publish his first book until 1913, when he was almost 40. But in the decade that followed, he published three more books, the last of which, New Hampshire (1923), won a Pulitzer Prize. That volume contained this poem, one of his best known and most beloved, which was apparently inspired by a real incident, one that may help explain what was behind his enormous burst of creativity. In the years before he found literary stardom, Frost lived in poverty in New Hampshire, farming to support his family and struggling to finish his first book. Riding home on the winter solstice, the story goes, Frost stopped and began to cry on the side of the road, overwhelmed by shame: he hadn’t sold enough at market to give his family a good Christmas. Such personal details are left out of the poem’s final version to accommodate a much broader series of interpretations, but their impression lingers: the woods, dark in literal and perhaps figurative ways, offer oblivion for the dispossessed speaker, who nonetheless chooses obligation and the hard work ahead. After all, he believed “the woods are lovely” because they are “dark and deep.” The spellbinding repetition at the end of the poem—“And miles to go before I sleep”—has been interpreted to reference the big sleep of death." - Benjamin Voigt
- Poetry Foundation (poetryfoundation.org)