“These fragments I have shored against my ruins."
This is a line from T.S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.” It is one of my favorite lines from the poem. It has always reminded me of poetry as a whole. Tiny fragments of words we scratch out on paper in defiance of our own mortality. Hoping our words will outlive us. Hoping strangers will read and understand them long after we are gone.
As you might (but most likely don’t) know, April is National Poetry Month. In honor of this I wanted to take some time to talk about a few of my favorite poems – my favorite fragments.
This week I have decided to focus on a poem by Robert Frost entitled Stopping by the 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.
This is a very important poem to me personally because it is the poem that first made me want to be a poet. Frost uses short lines with a regular style and simple rhymes on the ends of lines. Poems like this can often end up sounding sing-song and childish. But the tone and message of this poem are both emotionally complex and beautifully subtle. This makes the poem’s style seem elegant and sophisticated rather than simple.
The poem’s actual content is an extended metaphor about suicide. The speaker is feeling tempted to take his own life, not out of despair or self-hatred but out of apathy. He sees death as an inviting rest after a tiring life. But he ultimately decides to continue living out of a sense of obligation. He has “promises to keep.” We aren’t told what these promises are or who he has made them to, but they are the force that drives him to continue on his journey.
Veiling his true topic behind a metaphor and leaving some elements of ambiguity makes the poem more universal. Not everyone is genuinely suicidal but most people can relate to feeling exhausted by their lives and responsibilities. Most everyone can relate to wishing they could just be done with it all, just stop and rest. Many people can also relate to feeling obligated to carry on.
The final stanza is the most interesting and most important of the entire poem. As readers we immediately sense something is different about this stanza. The first three stanzas follow the rhyme scheme AABA BBCB CCDC. But then the pattern is broken by the forth stanza which is simply DDDD. Obviously the pattern had to change since there is no fifth stanza for the third line of the fourth stanza to echo into. But this is a very intentional move. Each stanza leads into the next and makes the reader feel pulled from stanza to stanza. The broken pattern alerts the reader that the poem has ended. It also creates a sense of finality. The issue the speaker is debating is no longer in question at the end of the poem. He has made up his mind. We automatically sense this without even consciously knowing it.
The entire fourth stanza is brilliantly written but the ending couplet, the repeated last line, is the true masterstroke of this poem. “And miles to go before I sleep.” We can almost hear the speaker repeating this sentence under his breath like a mantra. We hear his struggle and his weariness as he breathes out those lines. These lines are heavy as the speaker reflects on how much further he has to go. They are a complaint, but a quiet and resigned one.
I hope you’ve enjoyed Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening. Check in again next week to read about more “fragments,” more fun, and more fantastic poetry!
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| Read more of Padraic's work on Floodmark. |
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