Happy Birthday: “Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Today in 1923 – Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published in the New Republic.

The story of the composition of that poem is very cool. One of my favorite kinds of inspirational stories. It is when you struggle for inspiration that the muse often eludes you. And it is when you suddenly relax – let go – that inspiration sometimes comes. Mike Nichols says that the most productive day of a rehearsal period is often the day off. Meaning: you rehearse, you work on issues, you struggle to find solutions … and then you get a day off, when you go play frisbee with your kids, or sleep in, or whatever … and then when you come back to rehearsal, refreshed, the solution to your problem is so obvious that it might as well conk you over the head.

Frost wrote the poem in June, when the weather was, to put it mildly, not wintry. So first of all – I love that. His imagination, his ability to project his eye into other seasons, other times … It was not an immediate response to the immediate environment. And, of course, the poem – while it takes as its atmosphere – winter – it is actually about much much more.

He had had a sleepless night the night before – and had been working on a longer piece, something which was giving him a lot of trouble – the poem that would eventually be “New Hampshire”. (The poems he worked on in this period would be part of the collection New Hampshire which would win him the Pulitzer.) So he stayed up all night, struggling on the poem, and he did finish it – sometime around dawn. He got it to a point where he was pleased. And when he looked up, back aching, coming back to the real world – he realized that the sun had come up. He had never stayed up all night with a poem before – so there was a sense of novelty in it to him. He was happy, pleased with his accomplishment – so he walked outside and watched the sun come up. As the sun rose, he suddenly felt an idea come – a new idea – for a new poem – and the sensation was so strong and so urgent that he rushed back inside, sat down, and wrote “Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening” in about 3 minutes. He said later that he wrote the poem almost without lifting the pen off the page. Meaning: that poem came out whole. Extraordinary. He compared the feeling later to a “hallucination”.

Gives me goose bumps to think of that whole story. Struggling over one poem – which is one part of the artist’s craft – the intellectual side – the picking and choosing of words, crossing things out, hovering over the page, contemplating, re-working, re-vising … and then the other part of the artist’s craft – which is to leave yourself completely wide open to inspiration, and when the muse calls your name – you freakin’ ANSWER. Without question.

Very inspirational to me.

And when you think about the actual poem that had its birth in such a manner … it’s even more amazing.

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.

It is that last stanza that makes this a truly great poem. And by great – I mean classic. Eternal. It is why it is in the canon. Before the last stanza, although the imagery is beautiful and evocative – we are in a prosaic world, the world of the everyday, albeit poetically expressed – with neighbors and villages and harness bells – objects that cement us to the physical world.

But in the last stanza, Frost pulls his lens abruptly back … going into the universal and timeless. (Shades of what James Joyce does at the end of “The Dead”. Microscopic vision becomes telescopic in a few sweeping paragraphs.)

More on Robert Frost here. He wanted his epitaph to be “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Another Robert Frost page – with links to many of his poems.

His “notebooks” have just been published – review here.