"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening": A thank-you

How exactly does one thank a poem? Let's give it a try, because I owe this one a big one.

Way leads on to way . . .

This recent post by Cordelia over at Phenomenal Field--be sure to click on the image to enlarge it--reminded Yours Truly of Robert Frost's poem "The Wood-pile" (which you should go have a look at (the poem, I mean)--don't worry: I'll wait), and that reminded me of the good things that happened in class yesterday when I taught (again) Frost's most famous poem. I've used it each semester for, oh, the past six or so years as a sort of entree into The Meridian's Way to Talk about Poetry^TM (which pretty much consists of just asking a bunch of questions. A dark art, talking about poetry).

Here's the poem--not that you don't already know it, but just so you have it in front of you:

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.

The Wikipedia entry, by the way, is, by its own admission, stumpy, but it does serve as a useful and encouraging reminder that this poem is very much present in the mainstream American collective unconscious.

The thank-you below the fold.

The first thing that is so remarkable about this poem to me is that, short and simple (but not simplistic) as it is, and talking about it as I do with classes that at best are indifferent to poetry, it's the rare discussion that runs shorter than an hour. Some of that, to be sure, is my modeling of the above-mentioned Way to Talk about Poetry^TM, but only some. The far greater proportion of the work is the students'.

And what do we spend all that time saying? That's the second remarkable thing.

Sure: it's a familiar poem to many of my students, and so we get the usual familiar comments. "It's about death." "It's about being tired." "Someone told me it's about Santa Claus." But despite teaching this poem at least three and sometimes four times a semester for the past six years, in each class someone has said something about it that I hadn't heard before. Just yesterday, for example, someone noted that, while the first and fourth stanzas are pretty standard lyric, the speaker musing to himself, in the second and third stanzas he seems to become self-conscious: it's as though he becomes aware of an audience other than himself, as though, through the lines about the horse, he sees himself. In past discussions, I'd placed more attention on the horse and how we don't really know what the horse is thinking, so the speaker's guesses have their origin in himself and not in the horse. What appeals to me about my student's comment is that it keeps us in the poem's world--or, more precisely, in the speaker's head. It's moments like that that keep me using it, and looking forward to using it. It has yet to go stale on me.

A teacher could not ask for a more teachable poem, or a more student-friendly poem (not necessarily the same thing). It's easily accessible, easy to discuss, but the fact that we regularly talk about it for more than an hour indicates that it's not an easy poem to exhaust. It embodies the difference between saying and suggesting--and, thus, that there's no need to know just what those promises are or to whom the speaker has made them. No symbols or vocabulary to worry about (though, one memorable evening, a student asked if the horse was gay). It serves as a helpful starting point for talking about formal elements such as meter and rhyme, and even, growing out of that, a little set piece that I have where I speculate that its rhyme scheme may help reinforce the sense of the speaker's felt tension between his personal desires and his obligations to others.

So, thank you for this poem, a marvel in its simplicity, with that gorgeous line, "The woods are lovely, dark and deep." Thank you for enriching my students' lives, and my own as a teacher--that is, for turning me into a student again every time I teach it.

PS--
I started this post early this morning; as it happened, All Things Considered had this story about some recently-discovered 1940's lectures by Frost at Dartmouth. Fun to listen to.