Tensions in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening :: Stopping Woods Snowy Evening

Tensions in Stopping by Woods The poem as a whole, of course, encodes many of the tensions between popular and elite poetry. For example, it appears in an anthology of children's writing alongside Amy Lowell's "Crescent Moon," Joyce Kilmer's "Trees," and Edward Lear's "Owl and the Pussy-Cat." Pritchard situates it among a number of poems that "have ... repelled or embarrassed more highbrow sensibilities," which suggests the question: "haven't these poems ['The Pasture,' 'Stopping by Woods...,' 'Birches,' 'Mending Wall'] been so much exclaimed over by people whose poetic taste is dubious or hardly existent, that on these grounds alone Frost is to be distrusted?" The views represented--and the representations of the poem itself, affiliated with the work of Dickinson, Longfellow, Dante, and the Romantics--range from emphasis on its gentility to its modernist ambiguity. Nevertheless, more than one critic underscores its threat to individualism, its "dangerous pro spect of boundarilessness," which suggests the masculine conception of poetic selfhood with which the poem is commonly framed. Seasons were a conventional means to illustrate feelings, as in Helen Hunt Jackson's "'Down to Sleep'": November woods are bare and still; November days are clear and bright; Each noon burns up the morning's chill; The morning's snow is gone by night; Each day my steps grow slow, grow light, As through the woods I reverent creep, Watching all things lie "down to sleep." I never knew before what beds, Fragrant to smell, and soft to touch, The forest sifts and shapes and spreads; I never knew before how much Of human sound there is in such Low tones as through the forest sweep When all wild things lie "down to sleep." Each day I find new coverlids Tucked in and more sweet eyes shut tight; Sometimes the viewless mother bids Her ferns kneel down full in my sight; I hear their chorus of "good night," And half I smile, and half I weep, Listening while they lie "down to sleep." November woods are bare and still; November days are bright and good; Life's noon burns up life's morning chill; Life's night rests feet which long have stood; Some warm soft bed, in field or wood, The mother will not fail to keep, Where we can "lay us down to sleep."