Many years ago, William Rose Benét called Robert Frost a “wise old woodchuck,” and more recently Lionel Trilling called him “a terrifying poet.” Trilling explained that the universe that Frost depicts is a “terrifying universe”; but even as he was speaking, Robert Langbaum was saying that “Frost takes into account nature's destructiveness, but his examples of it are seldom very frightening.” To Yvor Winters, Frost was incapable of grasping the predicament of modern man; to Hyatt H. Waggoner, he understood the predicament and made a “strategic retreat”; to James M. Cox, he “forced a clearing in the woods,” braved “the alien entanglements of experience.”¹

Consider the variety of interpretations of a single poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Some earlier writers see the poem as a tribute to the New England sense of duty; Lawrance Thompson sees it as an epitome of the journey through life, with hardships (the dark and cold evening), beauties and pleasures (the woods), duties, and death. Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor think that the traveler's choice is between estheticism and moral action; John Ciardi prefers the woods to represent the death-wish. Most critics do agree—tacitly—on one aspect of the meaning of the poem: that it ends with a rejection of whatever the woods represent and an affirmation of whatever is implied by “promises.” An attempt to resolve some of the differences among such critics cannot do better than to begin at this point at which they are in agreement.²

For their agreement seems no more satisfactory than their disagreement. To say that “Stopping by Woods” ends with an affirmation is to ignore the tone in which the literal or symbolic meaning is given. Unger and O'Connor in their commentary on the poem assert that the effect of the repeated last line is to emphasize the choice made for moral action; but in fact the lulling rhythm and repetition, of both rhyme and phrase, deprive the assertion of force. The mood that the poem induces in the reader nullifies his acceptance of the intention expressed by the traveler. The sum of the reader's experience of the poem is different from the meaning of the traveler's experience of the woods. Presumably the traveler goes home to supper, to his duties, and to the rest of his journey through life; but these things are not the poem.

To put the matter differently, a distinction must be made between the spell of the woods that the traveler experiences (and that the reader of the poem may once have experienced) and the spell that develops in the poem. Each of the first three stanzas begins flatly; each rises, with the last line or two lines, toward the spell; but not until the end of the third stanza is the rise powerful, and not until the opening of the fourth and final stanza is the rise sustained rather than broken. The spell is clearly and firmly achieved only in the final stanza, both in the lines in which the traveler acknowledges the spell of the woods and in the lines in which he rejects it. According to Reginald L. Cook, Frost composed “Stopping by Woods” after he had spent a whole night working on another poem: “He went outside to look at the sun and it came to him. ‘I always thought,’ he explains, ‘it was the product of autointoxication coming from tiredness.”³ Presumably, then, Frost began not with the spell of the woods but with a mood; he referred his mood to a remembered spell of the woods, and referred it as well to particular rhythms, rhymes, and language. Frost's own statements on his art support such a view, not only as it applies to the process of composition, but as it applies to his chief poetic aims: poems “begin in something more felt than known” (“Education by Poetry”); the poet's “intention is of course a particular mood that won't be satisfied with anything less than its own fulfillment” (“The Constant Symbol”); the outcome of a poem is “predestined from the first image of the original mood—and indeed from the very mood” (“The Figure a Poem Makes”).⁴ At any rate, “Stopping by Woods” is, for the reader, not so much a recreated experience of the spell of the woods as it is an experience of words, images, rhythms, and rhymes; the action that its narrator commends to himself is contradicted by the spell of language.

A similar conflict between meaning and mood occurs in many Frost poems, notably in “Come In.” On the symbolic level, this poem presents more difficulties than “Stopping by Woods,” for the choice between woods and stars is not nearly so clear a choice as one between woods and promises. The woods may be the same in both poems, but are stars promises? Most commentators on “Come In” do not discuss the problem. They accept the implication in the poem that the stars represent something different from the woods; and they assume—on the basis of parallelism with “Stopping by Woods,” “Into My Own,” and other poems—that the stars represent human or social values. But the mood of the poem contradicts any such symbolic meaning. Although the narrator refuses to come into the dark and lament, the poem is a lamentation, and the narrator's refusal is a lamentation. In contrast to “Stopping by Woods,” the dominating stanza in “Come In” is the penultimate stanza. Almost everything that precedes it builds directly toward it, and the fall in the final stanza is a dying fall. The poem begins with a solitary narrator, a darkening woods, and a lonely bird. The second and third stanzas present deepening images of melancholy: the bird singing bravely and futilely, the light of day fading. With the heightened language of the fourth stanza, the melancholy mood is fully established. The last stanza diminishes—but does not break—the mood. The narrator says that he is “out for stars”—and although the stars do not possess explicit symbolic meaning, they do carry the suggestion of loneliness and isolation.⁵ The tone of the stanza is only slightly playful (no more playful than the tone in the second stanza); it is a tone of melancholy bravado, like the bird's, a tone of injured pride and renunciation:

But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn't been.

The renunciation in the stanza is a mood rather than an act. As a mood it is close to the mood of the rest of the poem. Superficially, the renunciation is stated more firmly than the renunciation that closes “Stopping by Woods,” but the power of the fourth stanza, the absence of a clear distinction in the choice, and the tone of the renunciation override the gesture.

The reverie, regret, melancholy, and renunciation that pervade “Stopping by Woods” and “Come In” are common to much of Frost's poetry. Their typical accompaniment is the spell, the dream, the tableau, the withheld action. In A Boy's Will, “Into My Own” sets the tone for several poems. The narrator expresses a wish to enter the woods, but he does not enter. He says that “I should not be withheld,” but the poem expresses only a yearning for darkness and isolation. In “Storm Fear” the narrator may—like the traveler in “Stopping by Woods”—go about his tasks the next day; but the poem ends with the mood of surrender: “And my heart owns a doubt ❙ Whether 'tis in us to arise with day ❙ And save ourselves unaided.” The titles of such poems as “Ghost House,” “A Dream Pang,” and “Reluctance” suggest their moods. In “Reluctance” the narrator does not wish to “bow and accept the end ❙ Of a love or a season”; but the poem affirms nothing except desolation. In “Pan with Us,” Pan forsakes his pipes, his joys: “Play? Play?—What should he play?” A Boy's Will concerns romantic weltschmerz rather than will—even a wind's will. Many of the lyrics in later volumes are similar: “After Apple-Picking,” “An Old Man's Winter Night,” “The Sound of the Trees” (compare “I shall make the reckless choice” with “I should not be withheld” in “Into My Own”), “To Earthward,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Desert Places,” “Moon Compasses.” Of course, these poems differ from each other significantly. The detailed daytime scene of “After Apple-Picking” is hardly to be confused with the impressionistic nighttime scene of “Desert Places.” Nevertheless, both poems are reveries, tableaus, dream poems.

Such qualities may not seem to include the dramatic quality that critics characteristically speak of in describing Frost's poems. Lawrance Thompson mentions the “drama-in-miniature … with setting and lighting and actors and properties complete” (25) of “Stopping by Woods,” and John Ciardi analyzes the poem as three scenes set against each other. But the poem presents a dramatic tableau rather than a dramatic action; the only action is the horse's shaking its harness bells. In “Come In,” the narrator renounces action. “The Pasture” describes a gesture. In “Reluctance” and “Acquainted with the Night,” the action consists of walking. Of course, these are lyric poems, but Frost's monologues, dialogues, and dramatic narratives reveal much the same quality. The situation in “Mending Wall” moves toward no conflict and toward no resolution. The narrator “could say ‘Elves’,” but he does not do so much as that. “The Death of the Hired Man” avoids a clash between Warren and Silas; it offers no genuine clash between Warren and Mary, but rather a revelation of the stubbornness of the one and the generosity of the other; it moves toward a conclusion that obviates a quarrel and an action. The poem is the coda to an action. “Home Burial” much more nearly approaches dramatic action, but it ends on the verge of an action that probably there will be no need for: “I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will—.” “The Subverted Flower” depicts the failure of youth to act in its own behalf. In these four poems, farmer and neighbor, husband and wife, and boy and girl confront each other; but the tension builds toward the establishment of a subdued, somber, or savage mood rather than toward an action. Other poems with a radically different tone possess something of the same quality. The narrator in “Two Tramps in Mud Time” does no more than maintain his stance against the tramps. In “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” the woodchuck commits himself to a defensive posture, and nothing in the poem recommends a different attitude to the reader. The narrator in “An Empty Threat” expresses a desire to abandon civilization, but he does not go (“I stay,” he says in the opening line of the poem) and he does not want to stay.

Awareness of these qualities of mood and image runs through all of the critical arguments that address themselves to meaning and action. No commentary on “Stopping by Woods” fails to acknowledge the spell of—or in—the poem. The differences of opinion arise through the transformations that the spell undergoes according to the poetic, psychological, or social presuppositions of the individual critic. James M. Cox, for example, speaks of the “haunting rhythms” of the poem; he then goes on to describe the poem as a “counter-spell” against the woods: “the act by which the traveller regains dominion of his will. The intricately interlocking rhyme scheme … and the strict iambic tetrameter, while they imitate and suggest the hypnotic power of the forest, also form the basis of a protective charm against that power” (82, 83). Apart from the questionable identification of the traveler within the poem with the poet making the poem (and presumably with the reader reading the poem), Cox's interpretation depends upon a reductive psychological theory that links “Stopping by Woods” to true incantatory verse and to nursery rhymes. The individual poetic quality of the poem—the haunting rhythm (of only the latter part of the poem, it should be noted)—has been lost sight of. Earlier in his essay, Cox makes his point from another perspective. Noting the prevalence of woods imagery in Frost's poetry, he says: “Frost … sees the drama of existence as man's willingness to risk himself before the spell of the dark woods. For him self-reliance becomes self-possession, and the victory lies not in the march forward into the wilderness but in the freedom he feels while patrolling the boundary of consciousness” (80). In this venture into poetic biography, he implicitly aligns himself with Lionel Trilling, whose address to Frost on the occasion of Frost's eighty-fifth birthday is another essay in psychological-esthetic theory: “When I began to speak I called your birthday Sophoclean and that word has, I think, controlled everything I have said about you. Like you, Sophocles … was the poet his people loved most. Surely they loved him in some part because he praised their common country. But I think that they loved him chiefly because he made plain to them the terrible things of human life: they felt, perhaps, that only a poet who could make plain the terrible things could possibly give them comfort” (452). Surely there is truth in what Trilling says, and it is perhaps because there is that Robert Langbaum can say that Frost's world is “seldom very frightening.” The reader at the end of “Stopping by Woods” and “After Apple-Picking” is nearer to being sleepy than to being frightened by or purged of the terrors of the universe. In some remote, abstract way he may be shocked by the world that is depicted in “A Drumlin Woodchuck”; but the poem is a delightfully grim poem (not at all like Oedipus Rex), and much of the success of it is that momentarily the reader becomes a wise old woodchuck like the one who wrote the poem. Trilling loses Frost's poetry in talking about poetry in general. At the same time, one cannot assent to Langbaum's expectations that the people in “Storm Fear” will have the strength to carry on the next day. The catharsis is in the experience of the poem, not in the experience that the poem refers to. And were the latter sort of catharsis relevant, the reader might yet wonder about the fate of Frost's particular farmer. Two of Frost's fellow New Englanders, Amy Lowell and R. P. Tristram Coffin, see such poems as “Storm Fear,” “Home Burial,” and “The Fear” as accurate reflections of a society that had lost its vitality. In her review of North of Boston Lowell speaks of the “left-overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, sinking slowly to insanity.”⁶

The problem of survival, in and out of the poems, is scrutinized from another standpoint by Yvor Winters, who wonders how well the farmer can withstand the storm if he dwells upon his fears, and how well the reader can confront the modern world if he reads poetry that is dedicated to weltschmerz. Fine word though catharsis is, Winters argues that sensibility leads to sickness: the society that devotes itself to feeling and imagination loses vigor. Winters notes “the vague melancholy” (165) of “The Sound of the Trees,” and he reflects that a poem that rests with vague melancholy is a bad, confused poem; for a poem ought to help the reader to comprehend the human situation. Of all of Frost's critics, Winters perhaps comes closest to an explicit recognition of the mood that dominates the poetry; but he is much more interested in prescribing the proper social function of poetry than in describing the actual quality—individual or collective—of the poems.

Not many critics believe that understanding a poet and his poetry amounts to a game in which the critic chooses his assumptions and works out an analysis that follows from them. Allowing for inevitable differences of perspective and value, most critics would probably assume that some general agreement could be reached about whether Frost has confronted or retreated from social responsibility and whether “Stopping by Woods” is a poem that is devoted to the problem of moral choice. At the same time, most critics would be hesitant about setting up a single inviolable set of assumptions to insure agreement; and occasionally someone attempts to show the merits in approaching a poem from differing assumptions. Applying in turn the assumptions of the new criticism and those of the Chicago critics to the analysis of a single poem, Charles A. McLaughlin writes:

It would seem that the reader or critic, instead of being dismayed at the apparent opposition of these two views of poetic form, should be grateful that a variety of methods are available to enrich his reading of poetry and that he should regret those occasions when any single method attempts to set itself up as the exclusive or “new” way of solving all the questions about poetry or as the only fruitful way of unveiling the humanistic values of great works of art.

The poem that McLaughlin analyzes from the two standpoints is “Stopping by Woods,” and his analysis from the Chicago standpoint (he uses Unger and O'Connor to represent the new criticism) is interesting: he describes a dramatic development of attitudes on the part of the narrator, from casual interest to momentary fascination to rejection. But the significant fact about both of his analyses is not that they proceed from different assumptions, but that they proceed from the same one. “Now I take it,” McLaughlin says in beginning the Chicago analysis, just after he has completed his presentation of Unger and O'Connor's view, “that there is little disagreement that ‘Stopping by Woods’ presents us with a dramatic situation, a moment of moral choice on the part of the speaker of the poem, as was presupposed even in the dialectical analysis just outlined.”⁷ Since the presupposition is questionable, the light that the Chicago criticism throws upon the poem is likely to distort it as much as the light of the new criticism. McLaughlin is presumably right that a single method is too restrictive; but a multiplicity of methods may be a snare and a delusion. The poem is there, and whether the critic uses a single or a double set of standards, his task is to illuminate the poem.

When John Ciardi published his analysis of “Stopping by Woods” in Saturday Review, he was beset by an outraged public. The response that most pleased him, Ciardi remarked later, came from a man who said only, “Get your big clumsy feet off that miracle.”⁸ It may be questionable whether the poem is a miracle or a minor lyric, but there is little doubt that it has been trampled down by poetic, psychological, and social theories. Even if the poem does make a choice of social responsibility over estheticism or the death wish, it makes the choice so slightly, so undramatically, that to discuss the choice as the essence of the poem is to distort the poem. It is a poem of undertones and overtones rather than of meaning. Frost once remarked about another lyric, “Neither out Far nor in Deep”: “Poetry is implication. Let implication be implication. Don't try to turn implication into explication. If I had wanted to say anything definite I would have put it into the poem.”⁹ Being a poet rather than a critic, Frost perhaps undervalues explication. And he perhaps—in this statement—overvalues implication. He is primarily a lyric poet; and, as he says elsewhere, the aim in lyric poetry is not mainly implication: the aim is song.

Notes

1. William Rose Benét, “Wise Old Woodchuck,” Saturday Review of Literature 14 (30 May 1936): 6; Lionel Trilling, “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,” Partisan Review 26 (1959): 451; Robert Langbaum, “The New Nature Poetry,” American Scholar 28 (1959): 327; Yvor Winters, The Function of Criticism (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957), 159-87; Hyatt H. Waggoner, The Heel Of Elohim (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 41; James M. Cox, “Robert Frost and the Edge of the Clearing,” Virginia Quarterly Review 35 (1959): 78, 83.

2. Lawrance Thompson, Fire and Ice (New York: Henry Holt, 1942), Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor, Poems for Study (New York: Rinehart, 1953); John Ciardi, “Robert Frost: The Way to the Poem,” Saturday Review of Literature 41 (12 April 1958): 13-15, 65-67. All quotations from Frost's poems come from The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Latham (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969).

3. Reginald L. Cook, “Frost on Frost: The Making of Poems,” American Literature 27 (1956): 66.

4. Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Latham (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), 45, 26, 18.

5. Such suggestiveness is called natural symbolism by René Wellek and Austin Warren in Theory of Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), 194-95. They refer to “Stopping by Woods” to warn of the hazard of such symbolism to both poet and critic. Sleep, they say, naturally calls to mind death; and thus the poet must ask himself whether he wants to use this suggestiveness in his poem or whether, if he does not want to, he can avoid it; and by the same token the critic must be careful not to assume that the natural symbolic meaning is the actual symbolic meaning that the poet achieves, and he must decide whether there is any confusion between such meanings in the poem. That there may be a confusion of meanings in “Come In” need not detain us in the present discussion. If there is any, it is not, in the opinion of this critic, a significant confusion, since it does not damage the tone of the poem. In this respect, Frost employs with complete success the natural symbolic association of the stars with loneliness and isolation. Consider the similar confidence with which Keats, in “Bright Star,” and Byron, in Childe Harold, rely upon the natural association in beginning two apostrophes to melancholy: “Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art— ❙ Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night” and “Ye stars! which are the poetry of heaven! ❙ If in your bright leaves we would read the fate ❙ Of men and empires …”

6. Amy Lowell, Recognition of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Thornton (New York: Holt, 1937), 48. For Coffin's opinion see New Poetry of New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1938) 11-24.

7. Charles A. McLaughlin, “Two Views of Poetic Unity,” University of Kansas City Review 22 (1956): 316, 313.

8. John Ciardi, “Letter to Letter-Writers,” Saturday Review of Literature 41 (17 May 1958): 15.

9. Quoted in an untitled note by Cecilia Hennel Hendricks in Explicator 1 (1943): 58.