Thank you so much for pointing up the Dantean parallels, which I don't think I would have thought of!
I assumed the "luminary clock" to be the moon?
I see your argument for iambic opening beat placement on the "I have" lines, but, personally...I feel the poem resounds more with the beat drawn on the pronoun. It renders the opening line more fluid (fluid like the rain and the lanes), and immediately creates a subtle enclosure through bookended assonance ("I...night"); it isolates dramatic double stresses on "walked out...out walked...looked down...passed by...stood still"; and just as soon as the opening "I" contracts over the opening three stanzas (3, 2, 1), it is immediately picked up by the rhyme on "cry" - expanding into the double end rhyme of the following stanza, finally opening out into "sky".
That double end rhyme newly intertwines with the opening "I...night" assonance with the centred "height" - which rhyme locks us into the final couplet, bookending the whole poem with the repeated final line.
That *sonic* journey of enclosed, inescapable circularity which the words describe is further heightened by the threefold repetitions of three sonic echoes from the opening line: the clock chimes of "one...wrong...one"; again over three successive lines, "against...proclaimed...acquainted"; and between "height...right", "sky...time...neither".
It all ties together with the inevitable enclosed progression of the terza rima. It's wondrously affecting.
Thank you, I’m dipping a toe into poetry and the mention of the rhyme scheme terza rima showed me something new, apart from the, to me, gloomy meaning of the poem.
I have never thought that there was anything at all emotionally or philosophically "dark" about the woods in Stopping By--I mean dark in the sense of the almost-death-wish that you seem to sense there. Never once. To me it has always been a lovely peace, away from the world's demands. A heavenly peace, you might say. Definitely not an ambiguous (at least) "deadly undertow." I'm not saying you're wrong, but there seems to be a real difference of sensibility there. Sure, I understand that any wish for a peaceful refuge from the strife can be taken as a death wish--it's not invalid. But I certainly don't feel it that way in this poem.
And, after some discussion with myself, I decided that that opening phrase is a trochee. I had not read this poem for a long time, and spontaneously made it an iamb on the first two lines. But that just didn't seem to hold up, and I changed my mind. I've thought for a long time that there is often a great deal of subjectivity in scansion. Also an element of expectation: if there's regularity, you expect it to continue, more or less. The "metrical contract," somebody called it.
Also, it had never occurred to me that the clock was stopped, though that is a very plausible interpretation. I always thought of it as representing a certain disorientation and bewilderment, as if the speaker is facing some difficult situation, maybe a decision, and the clock's testimony is just useless.
I'm not sure you have to read a menacing darkness into those woods, or the wish to stop there forever as a death wish. In fact, I think that it's possible to fixate on that idea to the point of missing all the beauty in the poem, and that the fact that so many high-school English teachers seem to do this is why so many people think they hate poetry. But I also think that the connection between the two poems (which I am reading in, and don't know that anyone else necessarily has, though I don't know that they haven't) is that there is, potentially at least, some consequence for wanting time to stop, to stay in one moment forever, and that the later poem speaks to those implications, albeit in a much more overtly dark and despairing way.
Funnily, I've always read those "I have" phrases unthinkingly as trochees, but then there's something jarring about the openings of those lines that isn't Frost's usual style, with unaccented syllables bumping up against each other. His style is to be so metrically perfect that you almost don't notice the meter --- it's so (seemingly) effortlessly part of the voice. (I'm sure I will be reminded of exceptions, but that's certainly a feature of the hendecasyllabics in "For Once, Then Something," for example. (A poem whose title I could not get straight when I was trying to talk about it in a public presentation the other night --- I should have it tattooed on my hand or something.)
This time, at any rate, I stopped and asked myself, "What IF these are supposed to be iambs," and then was interested in the way "have" becomes an accented word, as if you were supposed to pay attention to the verb tense --- which then began to seem thematically important.
Don't know if there's a real link (apart from 3 line stanzas) but this made me think of Wallace Stephens The Snow Man "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"
How different from the Dantean darkness, created after all by “Giustizia,” “la divina podestate,” “la somma sapienza e l’ primo amore” (Inf. 3.4-6). And how different is this speaker, bereft of all comforting delusion, from that other wanderer, saying with a sigh ages hence that he took the road less travelled, when “the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” and both that morning “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” For this benighted soul, as you say, “time itself, like language, has lost all meaning. Brava. Beautifully explicated.
Yes --- I really probably should have called it an anti-Dantean darkness, because it is such a weird material-level hell, with no glimpse of transcendence, just a seemingly eternal treadmill for the speaker to walk.
Terrific poem and excellent commentary. I hear the cry in stanza three coming from outside the narrator--some cry of impending mayhem (I see a woman brutalized by a man)--yet you are right (and thank you for it!) to read the lines as iambs rather than trochees. The key moment comes when he outwalks the light, and turns back to the sinister urban darkness.
It makes me yearn for that other poem! The suspension or erasure of Time in that moment of deciding and doing and living with it.
Yes, I think we naturally read a woman's scream into that "cry" --- but it's left so disembodied, as if the cry itself were an entity hanging on the air.
And yes --- he's just going in circles (also Dantean, now that I think of it), which I really saw clearly for the first time when I read it to write this essay. It does make me long for the freedom and agency of that earlier poem --- and the sheer beauty of it, from which this scene seems so divorced and degraded.
This is one of my very favorite poems -- bleaker than Stopping by Woods and resonant of a despair I feel blessed to have escaped myself but have occasionally bumped up against in others. It's beautiful. Profound and sad but deeply true.
Thank you so much for pointing up the Dantean parallels, which I don't think I would have thought of!
I assumed the "luminary clock" to be the moon?
I see your argument for iambic opening beat placement on the "I have" lines, but, personally...I feel the poem resounds more with the beat drawn on the pronoun. It renders the opening line more fluid (fluid like the rain and the lanes), and immediately creates a subtle enclosure through bookended assonance ("I...night"); it isolates dramatic double stresses on "walked out...out walked...looked down...passed by...stood still"; and just as soon as the opening "I" contracts over the opening three stanzas (3, 2, 1), it is immediately picked up by the rhyme on "cry" - expanding into the double end rhyme of the following stanza, finally opening out into "sky".
That double end rhyme newly intertwines with the opening "I...night" assonance with the centred "height" - which rhyme locks us into the final couplet, bookending the whole poem with the repeated final line.
That *sonic* journey of enclosed, inescapable circularity which the words describe is further heightened by the threefold repetitions of three sonic echoes from the opening line: the clock chimes of "one...wrong...one"; again over three successive lines, "against...proclaimed...acquainted"; and between "height...right", "sky...time...neither".
It all ties together with the inevitable enclosed progression of the terza rima. It's wondrously affecting.
Thank you, I’m dipping a toe into poetry and the mention of the rhyme scheme terza rima showed me something new, apart from the, to me, gloomy meaning of the poem.
A Jester calls out “Maybe he was foreseeing Trump.”.
I am stuck with the view that the light is never absent, so that the night is merely the yet uncreated light.
Even in my darkest nights sooner or later the light breaks in. The mood is real for many is as near as I can get to it.
I have never thought that there was anything at all emotionally or philosophically "dark" about the woods in Stopping By--I mean dark in the sense of the almost-death-wish that you seem to sense there. Never once. To me it has always been a lovely peace, away from the world's demands. A heavenly peace, you might say. Definitely not an ambiguous (at least) "deadly undertow." I'm not saying you're wrong, but there seems to be a real difference of sensibility there. Sure, I understand that any wish for a peaceful refuge from the strife can be taken as a death wish--it's not invalid. But I certainly don't feel it that way in this poem.
And, after some discussion with myself, I decided that that opening phrase is a trochee. I had not read this poem for a long time, and spontaneously made it an iamb on the first two lines. But that just didn't seem to hold up, and I changed my mind. I've thought for a long time that there is often a great deal of subjectivity in scansion. Also an element of expectation: if there's regularity, you expect it to continue, more or less. The "metrical contract," somebody called it.
Also, it had never occurred to me that the clock was stopped, though that is a very plausible interpretation. I always thought of it as representing a certain disorientation and bewilderment, as if the speaker is facing some difficult situation, maybe a decision, and the clock's testimony is just useless.
I'm not sure you have to read a menacing darkness into those woods, or the wish to stop there forever as a death wish. In fact, I think that it's possible to fixate on that idea to the point of missing all the beauty in the poem, and that the fact that so many high-school English teachers seem to do this is why so many people think they hate poetry. But I also think that the connection between the two poems (which I am reading in, and don't know that anyone else necessarily has, though I don't know that they haven't) is that there is, potentially at least, some consequence for wanting time to stop, to stay in one moment forever, and that the later poem speaks to those implications, albeit in a much more overtly dark and despairing way.
Funnily, I've always read those "I have" phrases unthinkingly as trochees, but then there's something jarring about the openings of those lines that isn't Frost's usual style, with unaccented syllables bumping up against each other. His style is to be so metrically perfect that you almost don't notice the meter --- it's so (seemingly) effortlessly part of the voice. (I'm sure I will be reminded of exceptions, but that's certainly a feature of the hendecasyllabics in "For Once, Then Something," for example. (A poem whose title I could not get straight when I was trying to talk about it in a public presentation the other night --- I should have it tattooed on my hand or something.)
This time, at any rate, I stopped and asked myself, "What IF these are supposed to be iambs," and then was interested in the way "have" becomes an accented word, as if you were supposed to pay attention to the verb tense --- which then began to seem thematically important.
Oh, and I do think the Dante comparison is very apt, especially as I happen to be reading Dante again right now.
I am one acquainted with the night as well.
Don't know if there's a real link (apart from 3 line stanzas) but this made me think of Wallace Stephens The Snow Man "nothing that is not there and the nothing that is"
Thank you. You take an old and familiar favorite poem and unravel its patterns and its historical allusions. You make a better reader out of me.
Wow.
"Wow" -- just what I felt.
How different from the Dantean darkness, created after all by “Giustizia,” “la divina podestate,” “la somma sapienza e l’ primo amore” (Inf. 3.4-6). And how different is this speaker, bereft of all comforting delusion, from that other wanderer, saying with a sigh ages hence that he took the road less travelled, when “the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” and both that morning “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” For this benighted soul, as you say, “time itself, like language, has lost all meaning. Brava. Beautifully explicated.
Yes --- I really probably should have called it an anti-Dantean darkness, because it is such a weird material-level hell, with no glimpse of transcendence, just a seemingly eternal treadmill for the speaker to walk.
And thank you very much for reading and commenting!
Terrific poem and excellent commentary. I hear the cry in stanza three coming from outside the narrator--some cry of impending mayhem (I see a woman brutalized by a man)--yet you are right (and thank you for it!) to read the lines as iambs rather than trochees. The key moment comes when he outwalks the light, and turns back to the sinister urban darkness.
It makes me yearn for that other poem! The suspension or erasure of Time in that moment of deciding and doing and living with it.
Yes, I think we naturally read a woman's scream into that "cry" --- but it's left so disembodied, as if the cry itself were an entity hanging on the air.
And yes --- he's just going in circles (also Dantean, now that I think of it), which I really saw clearly for the first time when I read it to write this essay. It does make me long for the freedom and agency of that earlier poem --- and the sheer beauty of it, from which this scene seems so divorced and degraded.
This is one of my very favorite poems -- bleaker than Stopping by Woods and resonant of a despair I feel blessed to have escaped myself but have occasionally bumped up against in others. It's beautiful. Profound and sad but deeply true.
Thank you for this careful, sensitive analysis.