By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
One of my most enduring relationships—lasting half a century and counting—is with a 100-year-old poem written by a man I never met.
In late 1923, well before my parents or I were born, the great New England poet Robert Frost published a collection of poems titled New Hampshire. The book would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize the next year.
The acclaimed work included some now-classic Frost poems such as “Fire and Ice” (“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.”) and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (“Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.”)
Frost added another little poem, also destined to be a classic, and called it “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Despite the poem’s wintry theme, he composed it on a warm June summer morning.
Frost was staying at his stone cottage in Shaftsbury, Vermont, north of Bennington. Frost bought the home—built in 1769—and moved his family there, planning to be an apple farmer.
The pastoral setting, however, also helped him write. One night Frost stayed up late working on a much longer poem called “New Hampshire.” When morning arrived, he went outside to watch the sunrise.
Suddenly, he was hit with the idea for a different poem, one about a snowy winter evening. Frost rushed back inside and composed it in just a few minutes while sitting at his dining room table
He later said it was as if he’d “had a hallucination.” In a letter to a fellow poet, Frost called this fortunate serendipity “my best bid for remembrance.”
It’s certainly one reason why I remember him.
Fifty years after Frost wrote the poem, I had my own stroke of good luck. I won a grade school reading contest and, fortunately, our teacher had selected a volume of Frost’s poems as the prize. (The photo of the wood engraving by Thomas W. Nason illustrating this post is from that book.)
The first poem I read in that book—and the one I’ve continued to read because I still have the book—was “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I am not sure exactly why.
Perhaps it was foreshadowing? An early sign of my emerging good literary taste?
Even back then, I was a budding writer. Maybe I recognized the clever word usage and rhyme scheme (“The only other sound’s the sweep, of easy wind and downy flake”).
The real reason probably is that like Frost, my mother was from Vermont, and talked often about her beloved home state which I’d never visited. Frost’s poem (“The woods are lovely, dark and deep”) took me there.
I am not the only one transported. Anyone who reads the masterpiece truly is standing, on “the darkest evening of the year” at the edge of someone else’s woods and watching it “fill up with snow.”
It is an experiential poem. To read it is to experience it, profoundly, but also to be reminded that we still must get on with the less profound elements of life (“And miles to go before I sleep”).
That’s a poetic experience I’ve had many times over the years, so much so that I own at least three copies of the poem. One is a treasured Christmas gift from my children, who have memorized it too.
I recite Frost’s poem early each winter, and several times thereafter, often to offset the drudgery of shoveling snow off my driveway.
I’ve mentioned it in my books.
I even recited it to Frost’s spirit when I visited his old farm and cabin in Ripton, near Middlebury, Vermont.
The poem has been a constant and cheerful life companion.
In contrast with my own interpretation, however, some writers say the poem is much darker, and perhaps even about death. A Frost biographer believes it is about isolation, nature, and the will to continue.
Frost did endure his share of sadness and death. He buried a wife and four children. His son struggled with depression and took his own life at the same Shaftsbury stone cottage house in 1940.
Frost died in Boston in 1963, but left instructions that he be buried, along with other family members, at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont, only a few miles from his stone cottage.
His epitaph is from another of his poems: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
And what a wonderful quarrel it has been. His poetry alone fills almost a dozen volumes.
The Vermont Legislature honored Frost with a resolution commemorating the centennial of the writing of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
He won four Pulitzer prizes, spoke at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inauguration ceremony, and was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
Yet, I believe that Frost’s greatest accomplishment just may be something else entirely.
He gave me one of my best and lifelong friends…
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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.
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.
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.
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.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
