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

Tensions in Stopping by Woods     The poem as a whole, of course, encodes many of the tensions between popular and elite poetry. For example, it appears in an anthology of childrens make-up alongside Amy Lowells "Crescent Moon," Joyce Kilmers "Trees," and Edward Lears "Owl and the Pussy-Cat." Pritchard situates it among a number of poems that "have ... repelled or embarrassed more highbrow sensibilities," which suggests the question "havent these poems The Pasture, Stopping by Woods..., Birches, Mending Wall been so much exclaimed oer by people whose poetic taste is dubious or hardly existent, that on these grounds alone Frost is to be distrusted?" The views represented--and the representations of the poem itself, affiliated with the recreate of Dickinson, Longfellow, Dante, and the Romantics--range from emphasis on its gentility to its modernist ambiguity. Nevertheless, more than one critic underscores its threat to individualism, its "dangerous prospect of boundarilessness," which suggests the masculine conception of poetic selfhood with which the poem is commonly framed.   Seasons were a conventional means to illustrate feelings, as in Helen Hunt Jacksons "Down to Sleep" November woods are bare and still     November days are clear and bright separately noon burns up the daysprings chill     The mornings snow is gone by night     Each day my steps grow slow, grow light, As by dint of the woods I reverent creep, Watching all things breathe "down to sleep." I neer knew before what beds,     Fragrant to smell, and soft to touch, The forest sifts and shapes and spreads     I never knew before how much     Of human sound there is in such Low tones as through the forest sweep When all wild things lie "down to sleep." Each day I find new coverlids     Tucked in and more sweet eyes shut tight Sometimes the neutral mother bids     Her ferns kneel down full in my sight     I hear their chorus of "good night," And half I smile, and half I weep, sense of hearing while they lie "down to sleep." November woods are bare and still     November days are bright and good Lifes noon burns up lifes morning chill     Lifes night rests feet which long have stood     Some warm soft bed, in field or wood, The mother will not fail to keep, Where we can "lay us down to sleep."