Thoughts for Christmas Eve....

Thoughts for Christmas Eve....


Frost was at work on a new book. Poems from Derry were
still maturing, some from England were almost ready. He had
never succeeded in larruping a poem as one might a horse to
make it go. Poems had to come to him in their own ways:

"A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness
or a love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression;
an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is where an
emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the
words".

Some poems took years to find their words. Among the
slow-growers was "Birches." The impulse for "Birches" had
been with him from the earliest memories in Lawrence, never
changing, always nagging him with the sensations of
striving and balance, but always incomplete. Throughout
Derry the poem seemed to be waiting a revelation. In
England (where no boys swing birches) Frost found the
physical act carried through to a spiritual meaning,
something to do with Earth and human aspirations. Now, in
Franconia, after three full decades, the poem found its
thought and the thought worked out its words.

There were other times when words came bubbling like a
spring runoff. At such times Frost would often write
straight through the night. One spring night a few years
later he found the cantankerous drafts of a long satiric
poem suddenly turned agreeable, almost doing the writing
for him. During five hours he hurried to keep up--images,
stories, history, snatches of conversation, phrases flowing
together as though following some unseen channel. The poem
ran on page after page without serious hindrance right to
the concluding ironies. Only then did he look up. Dawn's
first graying had begun outside his window; across the road
the angular rooflines of a barn were emerging. He realized
how tired he was, let out completely.

He got up to make coffee. Opening the door, he watched the
light coming and listened to the birds waking up in the
trees... Suddenly he knew he had company: in that tranquil
moment a new troupe of words began to play through his
mind:

Whose woods these are I think I know....

Pine trees, dusk, December, a horse-drawn sleigh, falling
snow--where did these words come from, so unbidden, so
self-assured?

His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Derry again, never-to-be-forgotten Derry. The words drifted
down out of the dark memories: a Christmas Eve when, much
too late to be selling anything, he had driven into town to
peddle milk and eggs in order to buy presents--no one
interested, all busy with their own family
celebrations--returning home empty-handed. And yet this
poem seemed bent on avoiding the personal reality in order
to create a new reality of its own. To make matters more
difficult the lyric demanded a tighter than usual bonding
of rhyme: four rhymes instead of two, and a linking of one
stanza to the next: a-a-b-a, b-b-c-b, c-c-d-c ...

This posed an enormous challenge: how to keep such a
linkage going. Dante could manage a rhyme-chain in Italian,
but in English the weight of crude links usually buried its
poem. Frost felt the bind at once. Four times he tried to
get into his second stanza; four times the lines collapsed.
Going on to explore the third stanza, he had better luck.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake....

Beginning with the right words, the third stanza not only
moved freely to completion but showed the poet how to go
back and remake the second.

One other test remained: the ending; where and how to cut
the rhyme-chain. Leave it dangling? Stop the poem in a
final three rhymes? Jam the end with five rhymes? Try to
hook the last link back into the first stanza? All were
unworthy of the symmetry the poem has promised itself.

Frost tried one line, then another; both were wrong. But
half-hidden in the words of the second attempt--"that bid
me on, and there are miles"--he saw the shining ending he
had been looking for.

The collaboration was done, the unexpected company
satisfied. Groggy but elated, Frost could now go to bed.
The Sun was just coming up.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a work of pure
sorcery. Whatever there is about good poetry--a mystery
beyond meter, rhymes, images, metaphor--it throws a spell
over the simple scene. An experience of pain and
humiliation is wholly transformed. Poet, reader, light,
dark, duty, life, love join in an instant of communion. No
words or rhythms interrupt the spell. They all move in a
planetary harmony. Form and energy become one within the
poem, as elemental as the mystery of an atom. The poem is a
culminating display of why Frost trusted form.


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.