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 channel between the relaxed, conversational idiom of the first three lines (note the gentle emphasis given to think, the briskly colloquial though) and the dream-like descriptive detail and hypnotic verbal medication (watch . . . woods, his . . . fill . . . with) of the last. Clearing and wilderness, law and freedom, civilization and nature, fact and dream these oppositions reverberate throughout the poem. Frost develops his own quietly ironic contrast between the path along which the narrator travels, connecting marketplace to marketplace, promoting community and culture - and the white silence of the woods, where none of the ordinary limitations of the world seem to apply. In a minor key, they ar 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 through the next two stanzas the commonsensible response is now playfully attributed to the narrators horse which, like any practical being, wants to get on down the road 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 product of tone and texture as much as dramatic intimation 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 escape from / To ask 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 entirely 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 once said, is as good as it is dramatic and in a poem like this the words of the poem become actors in the drama.