{"id":6082,"date":"2007-03-07T10:32:41","date_gmt":"2007-03-07T15:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6082"},"modified":"2022-10-12T15:24:53","modified_gmt":"2022-10-12T19:24:53","slug":"happy-birthday-stopping-by-the-woods-on-a-snowy-evening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=6082","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday: \u201cStopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today in 1923 – Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening<\/a>\"\"” was published in the New Republic<\/i>.<\/p>\n

The story of the composition of that poem is very cool. One of my favorite kinds of inspirational stories. It is when you struggle<\/i> 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<\/i>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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<\/i> 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<\/i>. Extraordinary. He compared the feeling later to a “hallucination”.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Very inspirational to me.<\/p>\n

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

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening <\/b><\/p>\n

Whose woods these are I think I know.
\nHis house is in the village, though;
\nHe will not see me stopping here
\nTo watch his woods fill up with snow.<\/p>\n

My little horse must think it queer
\nTo stop without a farmhouse near
\nBetween the woods and frozen lake
\nThe darkest evening of the year.<\/p>\n

He gives his harness bells a shake
\nTo ask if there is some mistake.
\nThe only other sound’s the sweep
\nOf easy wind and downy flake.<\/p>\n

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
\nBut I have promises to keep,
\nAnd miles to go before I sleep,
\nAnd miles to go before I sleep.<\/p>\n

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It is that last stanza that makes this a truly great<\/b> poem. And by great<\/i> – 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.<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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

Another Robert Frost page <\/a>– with links to many of his poems.<\/p>\n

His “notebooks” have just been published – review here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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