A snow covered landscape. A quizzical horse. A man with decisions to make. It’s one of the most enduring images of poetry in my mind. The poem is Robert Frost’s, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening .
Born on 26th March 1874, four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost is no stranger to even the most casual reader of poetry. The poet immortalised nature, seasons and landscapes in his work. His poetry straddles two different worlds – one that held the traditions of a century gone by and the other, that was about modern views and ways that were infiltrating American poetry at that time. But he was in no rush to embrace the contemporary style of writing. He stuck to what he had tried and found true, albeit with ideas of his own. He wrote both in rhyme and free verse, showing a fondness for the former form.
His work is easy to read, touched as it is by the language of the people he spoke of.
A poet of the soil and the land, he celebrated his beloved New England in his poems. No wonder then that he was made Poet Laureate of Vermont. Having worked on his farm for close to a decade, the poet wrote about what he sensed and experienced first hand. This resulted in writing of such vivid detail that it’s easy to visualise every tree and farmland as you read.
In Birches , Robert Frost says, “Often you must have seen them/Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning/After a rain. They click upon themselves/As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored/As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells/Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—/Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away/You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.” The imagery is spiritual – a condition of Frost’s writing – he could find the sublime in the ordinary. Beauty in a blade of grass and wisdom in the vines.
In The Road Not Taken , the poet sounds a warning for the future.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —/I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.” What is a warning could easily be a promise of a particular kind of life in the days to come. The quality of life comes from the choices we make now. There is a wry tone in the poem, a wondering of what the consequences of actions – or lack of – might be.
You’d be mistaken if you thought that the simplicity of his work replaces depth. In fact, this is where Frost’s genius as a poet lies – to speak profound truths in the plainest of ways. His writing is stripped bare of artifice, almost stark and unadorned, like a New England winter.
While he is also a writer of plays and prose, it is his poetry that guarantees him a permanent position in our hearts.
As is the case with most writing, we tend to read the most popular pieces. Mending Wall , After Apple-Picking and Two tramps in Mud Time , are great repeat reads. It is lovely to explore the other poems of Robert Frost. And there are so many of them.
Frost wrote with a light hand and a sense of fun. “I never dared be radical when young/ For fear it would make me conservative when old.”( Precaution ) In Pertinax , he says, “Let chaos storm! /Let cloud shapes swarm!/I wait for form.” He also affirms, “Let me be the one/To do what is done.”( Assertive )
Seldom have two lines made more sense, wouldn’t you say?
Srividya is a poet. Read her work at > www.rumwrapt.blogspot.com
