Renowned as one of the greatest American poets, Robert Frost is a literary icon celebrated by poetry enthusiasts and scholars the world over. One of Frost’s greatest poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” conjures up a veritable plethora of images, from the peaceful, wintry landscape to the darkly ominous deep woods. Many scholars interpret the poem as a nod to the danger of distraction and the press of obligations on a man’s conscience, and yet others read into it for its various and sundry interpretations relating to transcendence, mysticism, and religion, but it was the inscrutable John Ciardi who “first unsettled a great many poetry-lovers with his analysis of Robert Frost’s poem” in 1958, asserting that “the dark and the snowfall symbolize a death-wish, however momentary” (440). His irrefutable view of the poem revolutionized the way that many individuals now approach it.
The death-wish interpretation is based largely on the suggestive nature of the poem, and there is an unmistakable air of somberness throughout. Though the beginning lines are rather ambivalent, based mostly on the narrator’s observation of the landscape and the falling snow, it soon turns to darker things. “The darkest evening of the year” in line 8 may be a reference to the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year (and thereby the longest night), but it also conjures up an image of danger. The distracted narrator, no matter his intentions, is still subject to the bitter cold, and winter days are short. Stopping for too long in the snow-laden forest would inevitably mean death. Even though phrases such as “easy wind and downy flake” and “lovely, dark and deep” summon up the image of a peaceful landscape, the tone that the poem takes on in the last few lines are almost as cold as the snow the speaker is riding in. "But I have promises to keep," he says, as if awakening from his reverie of the first three stanzas of the poem, "and miles to go before I sleep". Sleep can be interpreted a number of ways, but in this instance, it likely represents a symbol of death, meaning that the speaker has obligations to fulfill before he can rest with finality.
The title itself even gives some indication of the death-wish. It is no mistake that Frost chose the word “stopping”, though he could have chosen a word like “hesitating”, or even “pausing”, which would ultimately lend the poem a completely different tone. As it stands, however, there is ostensible hesitation, and the temptation to stop and rest. As Ciardi puts it, there is an impulse buried within the poem, “hunger for final rest and surrender that a man may feel” (440). With the sense that there is more to his trek than simply a naturalist’s admiration of the surrounding area, but rather that the weight of obligations lie, largely unspoken, on his mind, the speaker can be assumed to be a a more morbid and introspective individual than initially suspected.
In his article “The ‘Death Wish’ In ‘Stopping By Woods’”, James Armstrong says that he himself “heard Mr. Frost himself at a public lecture pooh-pooh the death-wish interpretation”, but that this interpretation is not without merit; “if we feel obligated to accept Frost’s disavowal as the final word, then there is no more to be said; but we need not do so” (440). It is ultimately the audience that interprets a poem, regardless of how a writer intends it, though Armstrong’s further interpretation of “Stopping By Woods” coincides with Ciardi’s views of the poem. Armstrong speaks to the idea of the death-wish when he addresses the tone of the poem, saying that “the association of death with dark, with winter, and with snow [is not] an unnatural or novel one” (445). Armstrong also references Thomas Mann and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, both of whom have relied on the symbolic significance of snow to represent death in their own writing. Through Armstrong’s interpretation, Ciardi’s impressions hold true; that the death-wish is a significant facet of the otherwise innocuous poem.
The commonly-held belief is not the interpretation of all who read it, and as William H. Shurr asserts in his article “Once More to the ‘Woods’: A New Point of Entry into Frost’s Most Famous Poem”, “whatever associations with death the [poem] may have, they are also appropriate to another area of experience… a more problematical aspect of the death-wish interpretation is the existence in the poem of a concrete symbol of death” (586). While it is true that there is no one thing in the poem that points specifically to a solid symbol of death, many images are indicative of it, as with the dark woods and the press of obligations. In Shurr’s analysis of the poem’s structure, he finds that “line 13, ‘the woods are lovely, dark and deep,’ is central… there is only one assertion in the poem about the subject most under consideration” (587). Following his logic, the narrator’s attention to the woods is the actual subject of the poem, and though the unknown lies within them, there is nothing about them that unequivocally implies death. Shurr goes on to say that “the speculation that this resistance is primarily to the lure of death is finally inadequate… if death appears in the poem, it is represented by the ‘frozen lake’” (587). The lake, though it helps to paint a picture of the scenery, does not imply death strongly enough to be considered the only symbol in the poem that could be construed with such a meaning. Though Shurr makes valid points about the structure and tone of the poem, Armstrong’s affirmation of Ciardi’s interpretation easily convinces readers of the reality behind the rhyme.
Robert Frost himself denied the potential death-wish interpretation of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, but Armstrong encourages readers to challenge the assertions made by poets themselves; after all, Frost admitting that his poem embodies a death-wish would cause readers to question his motives, and “few men would willingly put themselves in the position of having to answer such a question” (440). Individuals who read the poem for themselves cannot help but see the images clearly presented there. The snow, the dark, and the unspoken obligations on the narrator’s mind are all irrefutable indications of the true meaning behind the poem.
Works Cited
Armstrong, James. "The "Death Wish" in "Stopping By Woods"" College English 25.6 (1964): 440+. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010.
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Shurr, William H. "One More to the "Woods": A New Point of Entry into Frost's Most Famous Poem." The New England Quarterly 47.4 (1974): 584-94. JSTOR. Web. 13 Sept. 2010. .
