[In the following excerpt, Meyers discusses literary references in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”]

The masterpiece in New Hampshire is the justly famous “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Like “The Road Not Taken,” it suggests vast thematic implications through a lucid narrative. And like its predecessor, it has the same technical perfection as the poems by Frost's greatly admired touchstones: Herrick, Shirley and Collins. Frost said that he wrote this poem, “my best bid for remembrance,” right off at dawn, after completing “New Hampshire”—though he later revised the second stanza. The most amazing thing about this work is that three of the fifteen lines (the last line repeats the previous one) are transformations from other poems. “He gives his harness bells a shake” comes from Scott's “The Rover” (in Palgrave): “He gave the bridle-reins a shake.” “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” comes from Thomas Lovell Beddoes' “The Phantom Wooer”: “Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet.” The concluding “And miles to go before I sleep” comes from Keats' “Keen Fitful Gusts”: “And I have many miles on foot to fare.” Though these three lines are variations from other poets, Frost, writing in the tradition of English verse, makes them original and new, and integrates them perfectly into his own poem.

The theme of “Stopping by Woods”—despite Frost's disclaimer—is the temptation of death, even suicide, symbolized by the woods that are filling up with snow on the darkest evening of the year. The speaker is powerfully drawn to these woods and—like Hans Castorp in the “Snow” chapter of Mann's The Magic Mountain—wants to lie down and let the snow cover and bury him. The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dreamlike line: “Of easy wind and downy flake,” opposes the horse's instinctive urge for home with the man's subconscious desire for death in the dark, snowy woods. The speaker says, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” but he resists their morbid attraction.

Two years later Hemingway wrote of resisting a morbid impulse in “Big Two-Hearted River” (1925): “In the swamp the banks were bare, the big cedars came together overhead, the sun did not come through. … In the half light, the fishing would be tragic. … Nick did not want it. He did not want to go down the stream any further today.” Frost's character, like Hemingway's, is only half in love with easeful death: the other half wants to move on and fulfill the promise of life and the promise of poetry. Vladimir Nabokov, an impressive poet as well as novelist, paid Frost a perceptive tribute in Pale Fire (1962) by praising his masterful repetition and closure, showing how the last two lines move from the realistic to the philosophical realm: “Frost is the author of one of the greatest short poems in the English language, a poem that every American boy knows by heart, about the wintry woods, and the dreary dusk, and the little horsebells of gentle remonstration in the dull darkening air, and that prodigious and poignant end—two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, the other metaphysical and universal.”¹

New Hampshire, Frost's most underrated book, revealed his supremacy in shorter poems. It received superficial but favorable reviews from Padraic Colum, Mark Van Doren, Mark De Wolfe Howe and the faithful Louis Untermeyer, and won his first Pulitzer Prize, in 1924.

Note

1. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Hell, trans. Dorothy Sayers (Baltimore, 1968), pp. 271, 274; John Crowe Ransom, “Thoughts on the Poetic Discontent” (1925), Selected Essays, ed. Thomas Daniel Young and John Hindle (Baton Rouge, 1976), 32; Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River,” Short Stories, p. 231; Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962; New York, 1969), p. 145.