Subjects:
Robert Frost’s well-known poem, “Stopping by The Wood on the Snowy Evening”. Frost was born in San Francisco, where he spent his first eleven years. After the death of his father, a journalist, he moved with his mother and sister to Western Massachusetts near to his paternal grandparents. He wrote his first poem while a student at Lawrence High School, from which he graduated as co-valedictorian with the woman he was to marry, Elinor Miriam White. In 1894, he sold his first poem “ The Butterfly, An Elesy”, to a New York magazine, The Independent. He married in December 1895.
1906, two of his most accomplished early poems, “ The Tuft at Flowers” and “The Trial by Gustence” were published. 1912, he sailed with his family from Boston to Glasgow, then settled outside London in Beaconsfield. Frost placed his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will (1913) with a small London publisher, David Nutt. He also made acquaintances in the literary world, such as the poet F.S. Funt, who introduced him to Ezra Pound, who in turn reviewed both A Boy’s Will and North at Boston. His best early poems such as “Mowin”, “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial”.
Frost won the first of four pulitzer prizes in 1924 fo
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In Stanza Four, in the first line (“The woods are lovely, dark and deep") Robert Frost tells us of man's love of God's creation, and in the other lines of the stanza he says that proper love of the creation leads to an awareness of our responsibilities to other human beings. The concluding “And miles to go before I sleep” comes from Keats. The careful repetition of the last line is a major rhetorical device.
The objective approach to a poem begins with personal interest in the poem. The effect at this repetition is the establishment at the precise tone of what it mean to have so many tiring miles ahead that must be journeyed before it will be possible to rest. So the poet's statement here is an example of unconscious irony. That is, when one has read a poem one has encountered the statement of a certain experience. With the Frost poem, one reader might respond subjectively by saying that it is stupid: “Why should a man riding a sleigh past a deserted wood be thinking about traveling thousands of miles ?”. Frosr employs alliteration as seen in “watch his woods”, “sound’s the sweep” and “dark and deep”. Is this a poem in which suicide is contemplated? Frost accordingly, as he continued to read it in public made fun of efforts to draw out or fix its meaning as something large and impressive, something to do with man’s existential loneliness or other ultimate matters. The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dream like line: “Of easy wind and downy flake”, opposes the horse instinctive urge for home with the man’s subconscious desire for death in the dark, snowy woods. Each of us would make decisions as to the precise meaning of “miles” for some readers they would stand only for seconds, as they might suspect that the poet was very aged and about to die any minutes. The true owner is God, whose 'house is in the village,' that is, who has a church in the village.
The poem “Stopping By The Wood On a Snowy Evening” composed at four-line stanzas each with a rhyme pattern of “aaba”.
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