Like Frost’s other most famous and most anthologized poem, “The Road Not Taken,” “Stopping by Woods” is a rare combination of naturalness and form. Its lines of almost perfectly regular iambic tetrameter fold into a perfectly regular rhyme scheme of augmented Dantean terza rima like that of a foreshortened canto—yet the dramatic force of the lines is to wear their staging lightly and seem to one’s suspended disbelief spoken in pure spontaneity. Like the woods for the poem’s protagonist, the poem has exerted a fascination for its interpreters beyond any explanation offered for it. Most famous—almost as much as the poem—is the reading later popularized on which the snowy woods represent the temptation to withdraw into death and the prospect of an afterlife, which the speaker entertains but comes to reject on the strength of his earthly commitments, his “promises to keep.” Frost often gainsaid this interpretation when reading the poem to audiences, saying the tone of the ending was not that of someone forswearing suicide but that of someone saying, at the end of a pleasant dinner, “Well, I must be getting on.” One can find something persuasive in both the overwrought interpretation and Frost’s coy, defensive non-explanation, the former manifestly right to find the poem imbued with mortal stakes and unassuming sublimity between the encroaching darkness, lulling snow, and unarticulated strangeness in a world the speaker thinks he knows. As “The Road Not Taken” embodies the liminal state of the crossroads, “Stopping by Woods” embodies the liminal state of the threshold, a line the crossing of which is freighted with the prospect of profound transformation, a prospect accompanied by a fascination not without fear. By whatever name, under whatever aspect, crossroads and threshold are metaphors we live by. Their ubiquity in our unthinking usage helps to explain why Frost was right to say that nothing like a resolution to live underlies the tone of “Stopping by Woods.” The threshold embodied in the poem does not formulate so neatly. Its dramatic force is in conjuring the sense of a depth of meaning so incongruous with the speaker’s easy tone, an experience bound to surpass the meaning we can assign to it. In this modesty about how to make sense of a line of trees he finds himself in front of, in his unostentatious engagement and elegant simplicity, in the genuine wonder that any regular person might feel on a walk on the winter solstice in New Hampshire, Frost’s speaker contrasts with Frost’s figure of Eliot as neatly as a pair of rhyming words.
LOVE AND NEED by Adam Plunkett. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2025. Copyright © 2025 by Adam Plunkett. All rights reserved.