My favorite portuguese poet of all time is a pretty easy guess, and a man about whom I've written quite a bit already. But maybe my favorite poet of all time is Robert Frost, a man about whom I've written a little bit less but whose work I greatly admire all the same. I read his poems at the tail-end of a pretty horrible summer, which is funny because most of his poems, or at least the most beautiful ones to me, always capture the stark beauty of winter and autumn. My November Guest does so, with the beauty of an autumn day possessing the poet's state of mind, and The Road Not Taken, arguably one of the most recognizable poems of all time, leaving us with that lingering what-could-have-been sensation when we're at a crossroads, but not during a summer as it is so often the case, and as it is so often the case with me, but of an autumn and winter, amidst the yellowing leaves of a nearby woods wherein the poet wrote, or at least came up with, his masterpiece. And now this particular one, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, is not so different, with the same images and the same cold and even some of that same bleakness piercing through the page. And a neat thing about this poem is that it was recited by Robert Frost himself, in a clip that we are lucky to have today, a clip in which the man goes through his words on the page with that same sorrow that was always so typical of him. As for me, in my old copy of his book, a copy I have since discarded in favor of a new one, I had written only one note next to this poem – The Sopranos.
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.
It's always neat when your favorite things overlap one way or another. To see the greatest poet of all time mentioned in the greatest TV show of all time is fun indeed. In this particular scene, shortly after his grandmother's untimely death, mirrored by the actress' death in real life, AJ gets some help from his sister Meadow when he's struggling with his english homework. The first thing he points out is how the poet is standing or perhaps sitting in the middle of a field covered with snow, and in fact this is an eerie image... The poet just suddenly finds himself in these woods, unknown to us but apparently well-known to him, being that the first verse is so striking that I myself borrowed from it a little bit. It's quite a beautiful scene, all peaceful, but there's something strange going on underneath, with the poet seemingly taking a break from his travels to sit in these woods, calmly admiring the dark and the quiet, and the snow too, a snow that falls like time passes – inexorable, inevitable, and cold... or then, in Meadow's words, endless white, endless nothing.
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.
This stanza is quite odd to me because in my head I often do imagine a farmhouse near, just a tiny wooden cabin, definitely not much but all tight and cozy, nicely sheltered by a steady rock on one side, from which nobody can enter, and with a great view to the frozen lake on the other side. Basically it's the perfect place in which to live if you just want to be left alone, the kind of place in the world that feels so permanently removed from the rest of the world, and the kind of place where the poet might want to stay at for a little while, or maybe forever... But of course this poem is about death, so he might not be so inclined to find such solace. While in a lot of places, and in The Sopranos too, a party in a big beautiful house with lots of people wearing cocktail outfits is seen as a metaphor for heaven, in Robert Frost not even a cabin with a fireplace is all that. So what the poet does instead is to stop in the middle of nowhere, almost spooking his horse, just the two of them there between a dark woods and a moonlit frozen lake, during the darkest evening of the year, which I might imagine as the anniversary of the death of one of Frost's children, a day of the year that when it comes it might leave our poet in such a darkness that not even the moonlight helps clearing. If anything, to sit there in the dark and the cold numbs the pain, almost permanently so, and sometimes that might as well be a nice thing.
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.
Turns out the horse really is spooked, wondering why his master stopped there in the dark in the middle of nowhere. The horse having a harness with bells is pointed out by Meadow as it being a horse that's pulling a sleigh, another obvious metaphor for death that AJ hilariously misinterprets as a detail of a thanksgiving poem. And so in all this cold darkness our poet seems to have stopped and sat for a while, admiring it as he would of a beautiful thing which, I suppose, to Robert Frost winter really was a beautiful thing. And in all that quietness of the easy wind and downy flake he waits and ponders. Should he return to the world of men, should he continue on struggling for yet another day? Or should he instead free his horse and stay there for the rest of the night until the cold takes him? I suppose for a man like our poet here it is very tempting... The cold can be bitter at first, it can pierce his skin like a thousand needles, but after a while they say it gets real peaceful, and so the poet asks himself without asking if he should on that very night, in that very moment, simply give up on life.
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.
And now in this last stanza we have the answer to that non-question if you will. The first verse right away tells us a bit more about the poet's state of mind. The word “lovely” used to describe this moment is almost strange, seeing as for most people this would be a horror poem almost, whereas to Frost it's a lovely picture, this very sad man sitting alone in the middle of nowhere, in the dark and the cold, thinking about life and death and almost deciding himself upon the latter... But he has promises to keep, he has things to do and places to be, he has not yet reached the end of the line. For him that end would come after eighty-eight years in this world and after fulfilling many promises and writing many poems.
Lastly, the repetition of the last two verses is so striking too, the kind of thing that leaves the poem in your memory, with the penultimate verse being read almost incisively, and the last one being read out slowly, as if the thought of dying still lingers on and will never quite leave him, almost like the promises are being kept with an ever so slight hesitation, a stoic thing but still vexing and tiresome. Regardless, it is true that Robert Frost did continue, and did walk his miles, and I'd wager he fulfilled his promises, maybe not because he was especially strong but because he was stronger than his urge to lie down and rest in that cold white snow, even for just a little bit, which I guess is all it takes.
Now as for little Anthony, studying a poem about death so soon after his loving grandmother's death left him in yet another potentially supernatural scene in show, wherein shortly after being left alone in the house he seems to hear the wood creaking, and so he slowly goes to his door to examine it, but all he does is call for grandma... Strange stuff but understandable and in all likelihood not supernatural at all, just having things on your mind causing you to imagine things that aren't really there. Either way it's still neat to think about... Now as for little me this poem concludes the trio of my favorite Robert Frost poems, all of which I every so often think about, be it in cold, rainy days, or be it in wandering walks throughout the city during which all I think about is the past, or be it when I'm faced with things that make me prefer the numbness of a never-ending cold, things that quite often aren't even that big or serious, but hey, they are what they are... At the time of writing I am sixty years younger than Robert Frost was when he died, and so assuming that the years will last more or less the same for me it is indeed true that I have miles to go before I sleep. That being the case then I'm not so sure what to do now, but I'll try to continue just a bit more, I'll try to continue just a bit more.
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