Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.nHis house is in the village though;nHe will not see me stopping herenTo watch his woods fill up with snow. nnMy little horse must think it queernTo stop without a farmhouse nearnBetween the woods and frozen lakenThe darkest evning of the year. nnHe gives his harness bells a shakenTo ask if there is some mistake. nThe only other sound's the sweepnOf easy wind and downy flake.nnThe woods are lovely, dark and deep. nBut I have promises to keep,nAnd miles to go before I sleep,nAnd miles to go before I sleep.

There are many who hold a position of resistance to Robert Frost these days. They consider him quaint, trite, cute, or otherwise too sentimental to be serious or taken seriously. Moreover, there hasn’t been a single American poet who has been as popular or widely read since his heyday, and for this reason, he is supposedly dismissible.

Most of the people who hold these and similar positions on Frost have terrible taste. Robert Frost is a masterful craftsman who makes images and ideas weave together so intricately, intimately, and inextricably, and he does so with elegance and ease. Every time I read “Birches,” I practically go into raptures. He is a subtle and elegant formalist who marries the set & familiar rhythms and rhymes of multiple forms with the immediate vernacular of the American common tongue. The result is a body of work that is indeed popular without pandering, perennial as an evergreen.

The purpose of a promise is not simply to keep it, but to let it draw us forward into a future where we fulfill it despite the visible and invisible forces stacked against us. A remembered promise is like an antibody when legions of “reasons” show up to convince us that breaking our promises is not only admissible, but even recommended.

What Frost shows us in this poem is a startling intrusion of promise, an interruption of both the past and the future into a richly textured present. Like Dante’s famous beginning to Inferno, Frost has his narrator “finding himself in a dark wood,” but there is none of the same Infernal anxiety that fills the subtext here. Quite the opposite. For thirteen lines, the speaker observes the world through an extremely attentive lens, carefully attending to what is happening now. A horse moves. The wind blows. Snow falls.

Two truths (among many) stand out, distinct but deeply connected.

The first is the relationship between the meditative and the expressive — between contemplative activity and pragmatic activity.

The old adage goes that “If I had 5 minutes to save my life by chopping down a tree, I’d spend 4 minutes of it sharpening the ax.” We see a similar proportion happening in this poem as the speaker spends most of the poem “sharpening” — receiving, delighting in, and observing what is. In the final lines, he turns back toward action. There are probably no fewer than two dozen ways to read the last two lines of this poem. One seems plain: a renewed sense of purpose follows this contemplative pause.

Too often, we rush to escape the deep, dark woods and only converse with the ruminating thoughts in our mind, blind to what is presenting itself to us. We miss the opportunity to be (to let ourselves be) in a strange wood on the darkest evening of the year. The panic sets in too soon. Frost shows us the quiet mystery, bringing us to remember ourselves, then begin on our way again.

The second thing I want to shine a light on has to do with promises.

One of the most harmful definitions of integrity is the familiar, “what you do when no one is watching.” It assumes that right actions are already obvious, and that the only test is whether we perform them in secret.

A more helpful definition: keeping promises. When I do what I said I would do, when I said I would do it, I demonstrate the operational integrity of a sturdy bridge or machine performing to design. When I keep promises, I work. When I break them, I don’t. My workability increases with each kept promise and decreases with each broken one.

I wonder if Frost felt this in the final lines. Promise is the turning point into action after thirteen lines of contemplation. The prolonged moment in the woods brings promises back to mind: he lives in community — bound to others through commitments — not alone in the wilderness. The wild, white quiet is a sacred interruption, reorienting the wanderer toward the thing that makes him, and all of us, work: promises that keep us working for the miles and miles to go before we sleep.