Contrasts in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening :: Stopping Woods Snowy Evening

Contrasts in Stopping by Woods The duality of the narrators response to the woods is caught in the blood line between the relaxed, colloquial idiom of the first three lines (note the gentle emphasis given to think, the briskly colloquial though) and the dream- comparable descriptive detail and hypnotic verbal music (watch . . . woods, his . . . engorge . . . with) of the last. Clearing and wilderness, law and freedom, civilization and nature, fact and dream these oppositions reverberate end-to-end the poem. Frost develops his own quietly ironic contrast between the lane along which the narrator travels, connecting marketplace to marketplace, promoting community and culture - and the white gloss over of the woods, where none of the ordinary limitations of the world seem to apply. In a pincer key, they are caught also in the implicit comparison between the owner of these woods, who apparently regards them as a purely financial investment (he lives in the village) and the narrator who sees them, at least potentially, as a spiritual one. This contrast between what might be termed, rather reductively perhaps, realistic and romantic attitudes is then sustained by means of the next two stanzas the commonsensical response is now playfully attributed to the narrators supply which, like any practical being, wants to get on down the course to food and shelter. The narrator himself, however, continues to be lured by the mysteries of the forest just as the Romantic poets were lured by the mysteries of otherness, sleep and death. And, as before, the contrast is a result of tone and texture as much as dramatic lead the poem communicates its debate in how it says things as much as in what it says. So, the harsh gutturals and abrupt movement of lines like, He gives his harness bells a shake / To subscribe to if there is some mistake, give verbal shape to the matter-of-fact attitude attributed to the horse, just as the soothing sibilants and gently rocking motion of the lines that follow this (The unaccompanied other sounds the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake) offer a tonal equivalent of the strange, seductive world into which the narrator is tempted to move. Everything that is written, Frost at a time said, is as good as it is dramatic and in a poem like this the words of the poem become actors in the drama.