Is it possible for a poem’s form to contradict its content? How might a poem’s formal features — such as its rhyme scheme, stanzaic structure, or lineation — serve to complicate the message conveyed by its content?
Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is a deceptively simple poem about a speaker who would like to stop his horse for a moment in order to behold the beauty of a snow-filled landscape. At the same time, however, the speaker feels pressed to keep moving so that he’ll be able to fulfill the obligations associated with earning a livelihood and supporting a family.
Although most poems are endowed with formal properties that serve to reinforce their content, the formal features in “Stopping by Woods” push back against the message conveyed by its content. Even as the speaker prods his horse to hasten toward their destination, the poem’s formal features work to arrest the poem’s linear progression and affirm the value of stopping to savor the serenity of a winter snowscape.
I. The Speaker's Conflict
“Stopping by Woods” focuses on an internal conflict whose specific contours may seem foreign to modern-day students. Within the local context of the poem, this conflict manifests in a decision that the speaker must make about what to do next. Should the speaker direct his horse to keep moving steadily toward their prearranged destination? Or can the speaker pause to marvel at the mysterious beauty of a wooded winter landscape? As literary scholar Terry Eagleton has observed, the speaker in Frost’s poem is pulled in two directions: “the unpoetic, briskly commonsensical horse tugs him in one direction, the darkly mysterious woods draw him in another.”[1]
Yet this question about what the speaker should do next is symbolic of a larger conflict that all of us are likely to face at various moments throughout our lives. Should we maintain the fast pace of our workaday lives so that we can pay the bills, support our families, and maintain a comfortable lifestyle? (The student version: so we can complete our homework, earn good grades, and matriculate at top-ranked colleges.) Or is there value in slowing down — in pausing — so that we can relish a resplendent landscape, mine the mystery in mundane experiences, and reclaim our time from the fast-paced productivist imperatives of neoliberal capitalism?
While an encounter with Frost’s poem might provoke readers to answer those questions for themselves, students should also be encouraged to consider how such questions are answered by the poem itself. Which side does the author take? How does Frost’s poem resolve what one scholar has described as the conflict between “poetry and practicality”?[2]
II. The Speaker's Decision
Some literary scholars argue that the speaker in Frost’s poem responds to the conflict between practicality and pleasure by prioritizing his commitment to familial duties and commercial obligations. For example, in the poetry anthology Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry, Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson argue that Frost’s speaker “is momentarily torn between his love of beauty and these other various and complex claims that life has upon him. [. . .] The speaker of the poem would like to satisfy both impulses. But when the two conflict, he seems to suggest, the ‘promises’ must take precedence.”[3] In proposing that the “promises” take precedence, Arp and Johnson give weight to the content of the poem’s last stanza: “But I have promises to keep, / and miles to go before I sleep” (14-15).
This claim that the poem prioritizes social obligation over aesthetic pleasure may also be supported by the poet’s use of a steady and unvarying metrical pattern. Unlike most of Frost’s poems, “Stopping by Woods” does not feature any metrical variance. Every line in the poem contains exactly eight beats, and each of the poem’s sixty-four feet qualifies as an iamb.
Does the poem’s adherence to a plodding rhythm — its unwavering fidelity to iambic tetrameter — suggest that the horse trots steadily towards its destination? Does the labored meter suggest that the speaker is the kind of man who marches steadily forward, in accordance with the beat of social convention, governed by normative expectation [restraint and moderation]?
The middle stanzas present the speaker as a man of conscience who is so mindful of his familial and commercial duties that he imagines his horse to be remonstrating him for momentarily neglecting them. Projecting the pricks of conscience onto his horse, the speaker reports that the animal “gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake” (9-10).
III. The Author's Counter-Message
However, other literary scholars argue that the form of Frost’s poem affirms the value of aesthetic receptivity over social responsibility. For example, in his book How to Read a Poem, Terry Eagleton argues that Frost’s use of a recursive rhyme scheme works to arrest the poem’s linear progression: “The rhyme scheme gives the appearance of moving forward only to keep curving back on itself.” [4]
While each of the first three stanzas introduces one new end-sound, each stanza also returns to an end-sound from the previous stanza and repeats it three times: aaba / bbcb / ccdc. This rhyme scheme, common to a Persian verse form known as the rubaiyat, is rooted in return and repetition rather than forward movement. Eagleton explains how it affects the progression of Frost’s poem: “The rhyme scheme moves in a kind of arrested motion. [. . .] It is as though the poem, like the speaker, is trying to forge ahead, but keeps being held back.”[5] In this way, the poem’s sound patterns hint at a wish to pause, to suspend all forward movement, and to linger in a state of quiet contemplation. Indeed, while the poem is set in both the middle of the night and the middle of winter, neither the darkness nor the cold seems to dissuade the speaker from wanting to stop and enjoy the beauty of the landscape.
That the poem affirms the importance of pausing to make time for aesthetic appreciation may also be supported by the poem’s stanzaic organization. In his Oxford lecture on “Stopping By Woods,” Paul Muldoon praises the way in which Frost uses the organizational unit of the stanza in order to enact the momentary pause described within the poem itself: the “stopping” between “woods and frozen lake.” Muldoon observes that Frost employs the “mimesis of the stanza finding its ‘standing’ or ‘stopping place’ on four successive occasions to coincide with a unit of sense.”[6] By using an end-stopped line at the end of every stanza, Frost is able to slow down the pace at which the poem is read, providing readers with a moment to catch our breath and take in the scenery before moving on.
Literary scholar George Monteiro offers a similar observation about how Frost suspends time by carving out a spatio-temporal envelope in which the speaker and reader can share a moment of aesthetic absorption: “The poet has made time stand still with his tableau of stopped horse, rider, night and even ‘falling’ snow — which, as the only contrast to this stillness — this moment in time — enhances the ‘out-of-time’ mode of this experience.”[7]
Again, while most poems are endowed with formal properties that serve to amplify their content, Frost’s “Stopping by Woods” contains formal elements that run against the grain of its manifest content. Eagleton’s insight about how the poem’s recursive rhyme scheme contradicts its assertion about the importance of upholding one’s promises leads him to conclude that “the form has a meaning which is at odds with the content.”[8] As we have seen, the disjunction between form and content may serve to dramatize the speaker’s internal conflict: that is, the conflict between duty and desire, between what we are mandated to do and what we may wish to do — a conflict that may also be felt by readers.
IV. A Final Question
Which of the two interpretations described above seems more compelling to you? Can both be correct at the same time? Might the author’s point be that, as one literary scholar has argued, the active mind does not need to resolve such tensions but feels comfortable with the indeterminacy of “unresolved complements”?[9]
Literary scholar Guy Rotella praises Frost for the “complementary inclusiveness that marks his art.”[10] Re-describing oppositionality in terms of complementarity, Rotella affirms that Frost’s poem "stages its play of opposites at typically Frostian borders between night and day, storm and hearth, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility. It works them, not 'out' to resolution but in permanent suspension as complementary counters in mens amini, the feeling thought of active mind."[11]