Like many of Frost’s poems, “Stopping …” explores the theme of the individual caught between nature and civilization. The speaker's location is on the border between civilization and wilderness and it echoes a common theme throughout American literature. The speaker is drawn to the beauty and allure of the woods, which represent nature, but has obligations—“promises to keep”—which draw him away from nature and back to society and the world of men. The speaker is thus faced with a choice of whether to give in to the allure of nature, or remain in the realm of society. Some critics have interpreted the poem as a meditation on death—the woods representing the allure of death, perhaps suicide, which the speaker resists in order to return to the mundane tasks which order daily life.
Most critics agree that In Memoriam can readily be divided into four sections marked by the three Christmas celebrations following Hallam's death. The mood progresses from despair, longing, doubt, and sorrow to hope, inner-peace, and faith. The poem considers death and the stages of bereavement as the narrator experiences intense grief, nostalgia, and disconsolation, as well as the contemplation of immortality with the desire for a future reunion with the dead. The eventual outcome of this renewed faith is tempered with knowledge of scientific advancement and is necessarily compatible with it. In Memoriam seeks to represent man's journey to understand suffering, love, and his own purpose.
Grief often closes one off from the world, making it difficult to move forward with life, as seen in In Memoriam. Despite this contained style, the entire poem progresses from descriptions of grief to transcendence. Tennyson concludes In Memoriam with the realization that his friend lives in higher forms, symbolized by the marriage described in the Epilogue. He connects the ideas of life and death in a cyclical fashion — death eventually brings rebirth and the possibility for life to emerge. Tennyson isolates himself and his heart, unable to comprehend how someone so dear to him can be taken from this earth. He suggests however, that his isolation and sadness is temporary, and that he intends to fall in love or experience companionship again. The last stanza of our excerpt “If death …” speaks volume beyond certain words: “And love will last”, “spiritual prime/ Rewaken with the dawning soul”.
Therefore, our both poems have as main theme, the theme of death, but the perspective is rather optimistic. Robert Frost can’t forget his duties towards the civilisation while Lord Tennyson suggests that from every dark tunnel emerges light.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
The plot of “Stopping by Woods” is straightforward: a man (we assume) narrates his experience of driving some sort of horse-drawn vehicle by privately owned woods on a snowy evening. He stops, and then contemplates how strange his halt must seem to the horse, given that it is cold and dark and there is no farmhouse in sight. The horse shakes his harness bell, an action that the man interprets as the animal asking “if there is some mistake.” The man then listens to the wind and the snow and ends his account with some remarks on his experience, his responsibilities to the world, and the distance he needs to travel before he sleeps. The story could easily be true — it certainly aims to be “true to life” — but it is hard not to interpret it symbolically. Many readers over the years have felt that the man’s journey toward sleep represents life’s “journey” toward death, though Frost himself insisted that the last two lines were not an invocation of death. Another popular way of reading the poem is to understand the man’s rejection of the woods as an acceptance of social duty and personal responsibility.
But “Stopping by Woods” is a much stranger poem than may appear at first. From the opening lines, we know that the story is being told from the speaker’s point of view (”Whose woods these are I think I know”), but we may never bother to consider whom the man is addressing. The addressee of the poem can only be the man himself, who seems to be narrating the events as they occur to him, or thinking “aloud” to himself. This odd, subjective perspective is worth puzzling over, if only because it allows us to see just how self-conscious the man is. Why is he so concerned about being seen stopping by the woods? Is it simply because he fears he will be accused of trespassing on someone else’s property? Perhaps he feels guilty that he has temporarily suspended his business and does not wish to be seen or see himself as someone who shirks responsibility. Or it could be that he feels guilty for indulging in a fantasy, for he is attracted to something he feels he should resist. It is hard to say what the woods represent for the man — rest, death, nature, beauty, solitude, oblivion — but it is clear that he feels he should not allow himself to give in to his desire to stay there. There is moreover a sexual dimension to his fantasy: the feminine woods (”lovely, dark and deep”) are set against a world of men where promises must be kept — the world of property and business.
Whatever depths “Stopping by Woods” possesses, it gives us the impression of simplicity. How does the poem manage this? Most obviously, its language remains conversational throughout and it generally avoids twisting around the word order of spoken speech. “Stopping by Woods” also contains only one word with more than two syllables. When the poem does alter the expected word order, as in “Whose woods these are I think I know,” the sound and the sense of the line help us forget that there is anything odd going on.
Caught in the flow of the poem, we tend not to notice that the lines “Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year” neither follow logically from the lines that come before them nor form a complete sentence on their own. Once again, we might feel that we are listening to the thoughts of the speaker. He is situating himself in place (”Between the woods and frozen lake”) and time (”The darkest evening of the year”), where “darkest” may imply the “longest” evening of the year, December 22, the winter solstice. By calling the evening “darkest,” the man suggests that he has reached a low point or a moment of crisis.
Another reason why “Stopping by Woods” seems simple is that it is structured around many familiar oppositions. A complete list of these oppositions would be unusually long for such a short poem: man and nature, masculine and feminine, emptiness and fullness, movement and stopping, society and solitude, life and death, activity and sleep, and so on. Such familiar distinctions may make us feel at home in the poem, but they may also be disturbing. The categories either seem too fixed (should we only associate men with activity) or too fluid (which is empty, life or death?). Oppositions also help determine the poem’s organization: “Stopping by Woods” constantly alternates between inner thoughts and descriptions of the world outside. Even within its descriptive mode, the poem shifts from the visual details of the first stanza (”He will not see ... To watch his woods”) to the sounds of the third stanza (”harness bells ... The only other sound’s the sweep”).
Meanwhile the second and the fourth stanzas are more reflective. In the second stanza, the man imagines what the horse is thinking. The fourth stanza is even more subjective in its description of the woods as “lovely, dark and deep.” All of this inward and outward movement and the poem’s oppositions make us feel that the man is being pulled in different directions and needs to make a decision.
But before looking at the decision the man makes in the last stanza, it is worthwhile to stop and examine some of the odd features of his descriptions. Why is his horse “little”? Why is the wind “easy” and the flake “downy”?
Perhaps, by calling the horse “little,” Frost gives us a sense of the small-ness of the figures in the landscape. We furthermore sense that the man is not rich and is probably fond of his animal. “Easy” and “downy” may in their own way hint at what the man is feeling.
The description of the woods in the final stanza leads into the strangest and most memorable section of the poem. It begins innocently enough and even sounds like a cliché: “The woods are lovely.” But the vagueness of the description, the pulse of the line, and the repetition of sounds (”dark and deep”) suggest that we are entering a kind of dream-world. The drowsy repetition of “And miles to go before I sleep” completes this effect, and we sense that the poem is enacting what the man is feeling.
The first three stanzas have rhymes in the first, second, and fourth lines. The third line then rhymes with the first line of the following stanza, helping us feel that all four stanzas connect like links in a chain. But the established rhythms and rhymes are disrupted in the final stanza. The line “But I have promises to keep” is not as rhythmically insistent as the other lines of the poem. It also contains the poem’s only three-syllable word, “promises.” Just as the man attempts to shake off his dreamy attraction to the woods, we are brought up short with this jarring line. The last two lines then feel like a fade out, not simply because of the repetition, but due to the return of the rhythm and the absence of a new linking word: all four lines of this stanza rhyme.
Going further on the other side, the poem “If Sleep and Death …” extracted from “In Memoriam”, takes us to the most debated subject: the state of the soul after death. Professor A.C. Bradley reckons that in all his fancies or speculations the underlying question is that of the possibility of his reunion with his friend. The professor manages to quote the author regarding his point of view just as it is depicted in our fragment: ”But perhaps my friend is not advancing now; perhaps after death souls sleep till some general awakening. This would not separate us; for when he awoke unchanged, his love would awoke too.”
So far the poet has assumed that his friend immediately after death entered on a new conscious life; and he has asked whether this new life has carried him so far that the poet, at his own death, will be unable to rejoin him. Now he considers the possibility of an intermediate state of sleep, and the bearing of this possibility on the question of future communion. If, he says, this sleep is complete, so that no new experience comes to the soul, its memory and love will revive unchanged at the general awakening, when the friends will be together. It is observable that in Tennyson's abstract of this section {Memoir, II. 421) the notion of a general re-awakening disappears. Indeed the whole thought of the section was foreign to his habitual mode of imagining the state after death.
However, the critic notices several figures of speech which should plead for the abovementioned idea. First of all, Tennyson compares the soul with a flower which closes during the night - “every spirit’s folded bloom”. It is “Bare of the body” and so suffering no change, and acquiring no new quality, through it. Furthermore, soul’s character is due solely to its earthly experience. The word “figured” from the third stanza is marked with character-traces: it “enrolls”. The idea is that all the souls that ever lived on earth sleep, with all their experience enclosed in them, till a general re-awakening. It is supposed that “figured leaf”' comes to repeat the idea of “leaf” meaning “petal” and “figured” referring to its coloured markings or pattern.
Bradley has no doubt that the reference is to the calyx-leaves, which in some plants close round the flower, or even to a leaf like the spatha of an arum. If so, he still understands “figured” of surface-markings, not of the shape of the outline. But he claims that the new idea which enters with these lines is to be found in “garden” and “total world” not in “figured leaf”. Another two points of interest for critics are “in Time” and “prime”. The professor Bradley considers that the first is a metaphor for the earthly life and the second for the daybreak, when the sleep of the soul is over.
However the interpretation, whether right or wrong, the entire oeuvre “In Memoriam” anticipates electronic hyper-textuality precisely by challenging narrative and literary form based upon it. Convinced that the thrust of elegiac narrative, which drives the reader and the mourner relentlessly from grief to consolation, falsified his own experiences, the poet constructed a poem of 131 fragments to communicate the ebb and flow of emotion, particularly the way the aftershocks of grief irrationally intrude long after the mourner has supposedly recovered.
In the end of our educational essay, we cannot but admit that both poems are similar to the quicksand: so fascinating to explore, but never reaching the core. Whether is death, whether is sleep, whether is flower or just a snow, both Robert Frost and Alfred Lord Tennyson expressed marvellously their own feelings when they had to face with a great loss. Furthermore, they managed through their poetry to be so topical and to be read nowadays with the same interest as they were on their “Time”, and that for “sleep never fades away”.
1. Robert Frost, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Frost.
. http://www.enotes.com/poetry-criticism/stopping-by-woods-snowy-evening-robert-frost
. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/poetryeverywhere/frost.html
. http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/tennyson/im/kuzmowycz12.html
. Monte Steven, in an essay for Poetry for Students, http://www.answers.com/topic/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-poem-7.
. Bradley A.C., A Commentary on Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Macmillan and Co, London, 1907, page 124-125, http://www.archive.org/details/commentaryontenn00bradrich