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Elective English–II

Notes Pulitzer Prizes and was invited to recite his poem “The Gift Outright” at President John F.
Kennedy’s inauguration in January 1961. Frost died in Boston two years later. One may regard
him as among the greatest poets of his generation.

7.1 Meaning of the Poem

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” presents one person’s momentary encounter with
nature. We do not know whether the speaker (narrator) is a man or a woman. In fact, we know
nothing about the person except that he or she has been travelling on a country road in a
horse-drawn wagon (or cart or carriage) on “the darkest evening of the year.” If by this phrase
the speaker/narrator means the longest night of the year—that is, the night with the most
hours of darkness–then the day is either December 21 or 22. In the northern hemisphere, the
winter solstice occurs each year on one of those days. The solstice is the moment when the sun
is farthest south. However, if by “darkest evening” he means most depressing, bleakest, or
gloomiest, he may be referring to his state of mind.

Let us assume that the speaker is a man, the poet Frost himself, who represents all people on
their journey through life. When he sees an appealing scene, woods filling with snow, he stops
to observe. Why does this scene appeal to him? Because, he says, the woods are “lovely, dark,
and deep.”
Perhaps he wishes to lose himself in their silent mystery, away from the routine and regimen
of everyday life—at least for a while. Maybe the woods remind him of his childhood, when
he watched snow pile up in hopes that it would reach Alpine heights and cancel school and
civilization for a day. Or perhaps the woods represent risk, opportunity—something dangerous
and uncharted to be explored. It could be, too, that they signify the mysteries of life and the
afterlife or that they represent sexual temptation: They are, after all, lovely, dark, and deep.
The traveller might also regard the woods as the nameless, ordinary people who have great
beauty within them but are ignored by others. This interpretation recalls a theme in Thomas
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” in which Gray writes:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Here the gem in the bottom of the ocean and the flower in the desert symbolize neglected
people with much to offer the world if only someone would take time notice them. The woods
in Frost’s poem are just as lovely as the flower and just as dark and deep as the cave holding
the gem, but civilization pays little heed to the gem, the flower, and the woods.
Perhaps Frost sees the woods as a symbol of the vanishing wilderness consumed by railroads,
highways, cities, shopping centres, parking lots. A man in the village owns the woods now.
What will he do with them?

In 1958, poet John Ciardi (1916-1986) suggested in Saturday Review magazine that the woods
in Frost’s poem symbolize death. He further wrote that the speaker/narrator wants to enter
the woods—that is, he wants to die, commit suicide. Frost himself scoffed at this interpretation
in public appearances and in private conversations. But is it possible that Frost’s subconscious
mind was speaking in the poem, revealing thoughts and desires unknown to his conscious
mind?

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