Waking from Sleep on a Moonlit Evening

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I woke in the still of the night recently to the bright glow, near daylight-like moon illuminating my bedroom, and leaning over to look out the window, for a moment the cool blue of the moonlight made it seem as if everything were covered in snow. And it was cold out there, the year’s first really sub-freezing temperatures, the air cold on the other side of the big down comforter, the cat curled tightly into herself and the folds of the comforter at our feet.

 The quiet and the cold combined with the world bathed in that light, the trees having lost most of their leaves now and the shadows of the woods beyond my yard standing in stark contrast to the lawn bathed in “midnight moonlight,” I was reminded of Peter Rowan’s classic bluegrass tune, “Midnight Moonlight,”

the twangy drawl of his voice, the smooth, stunning picking of Tony Rice’s guitar running through it all. 

That second verse of that song always gets me:  

…If you ever feel sorrow for the deeds you have done
With no hope for tomorrow in the setting of the sun
And the ocean is howling for the things that might have been
And that last good morning sunrise will be the brightest you've ever seen
In the moonlight, in the midnight, in the moonlight, midnight, moonlight…

But that bright-lit lawn, the still, dark, quiet of the house extending out into the eerier still darkness of the woods that stand all all around my home in rural Connecticut then brought me to thinking of Robert Frost and his perhaps too famous, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Lines from the poem have found themselves onto numerous Etsy mugs and T-shirts, prints and calendars, but the poem itself, when considered on its own terms, stands as a perfect example of Frost’s seeming simplicity—that gentlemanly Vermont farmer tone coupled with penetrating philosophical nuance. I’m sure many of you know the poem, or at least lines from it and I’m pretty sure it was one of if not the first ever poem I memorized by heart (right up there with Poe’s “The Raven”).

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost

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.

The poem instantly establishes a strong, sing-songy meter that runs throughout—four beats of unstressed then stressed syllables, or iambic tetrameter—an iamb being a fancy term for a grouping of two syllables (a poetic foot), the first unstressed the second stressed, tetrameter referring to the four groupings of iambs—“whose woods these are I think I know.” You can easily hear the four beats. But what strikes me even more than the meter in that first line is the odd rearrangement of words, the syntax. Notice it’s not “I think I know whose woods these are”—also 4 groupings of iambs. By changing to a non-standard syntax, the poem signals right away that something else is “off,” mis-arranged. It also pushes the image of the woods to the front of the question, “Whose woods these are….” It’s the woods themselves he stopped alongside of that stir something in him, forced him to pause on his normative course, even disrupting the normative syntax of his thinking. 

The inversion of the syntax also allows him to land on that expression of uncertainty, “I think I know,”—which gives him further pause, making him consider the limitations of human knowledge. For me it also speaks to a range of human shortcomings, of our imperfect way of reaching toward and understanding things outside the realm of our understanding.

This all brings him to an odd logical expression, “His house is in the village, though.”—that “though” emphasizing several levels of disconnection. The woods are here, but they are owned by someone with a house that is far away, in the village he is likely headed toward. That “though” also suggests that something about that whole arrangement is, like the syntax of the opening line, somehow off, or mis-ordered. If these are your woods, why are you not there, residing amongst them? It further pushes us to think about the whole abstract concept of ownership, of property—especially ownership of the natural land—and not human-constructed edifices. Can this section of the natural world be “yours,” be “owned”? His first reaction to woods, eventually seen as “lovely, dark and deep,” is to attempt to correlate them with who bears human ownership of them. That “His house is in the village though” starts to acknowledge the shallowness and insufficiency of that kind of response to places of natural wonder. He turns to that mode of thinking about nature instinctively, but clearly something else has stopped him by these woods, and that simple, understated “though” releases him to consider the woods, the whole of this “queer” event in a different way. 

He turns from this insufficient human response to the woods, this inexplicable, unjustifiable, logically unexplainable event (stopping with no apparent reason alongside a stretch of woodlands) to observe his horse’s response—a non-human response. Right away, however, he ascribes human reactions onto the horse, who “must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near / Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year.” Here Frost’s assumptions that the horse “must think it queer” surely speak to his own realization that he is moving—that he has moved—outside the normative realm of human behavior—to do one’s job, to ride your horse and carriage home without stopping without good reason, as if to consider it all through the horse’s point of view will help underscore how unnatural, how out of step this is with what one should be doing. The interjection of “without a farmhouse near” and “between the woods and frozen lake” and “the darkest evening of the year” at first all seem to be used to point out just how ridiculous and silly it is to stop here, though at the same time they introduce the heart of the mystery and power of this simple pause in the normative momentum of one’s life. Here I sense the speaker of the poem really starting to be moved emotionally, spiritually, poetically by considering the entirety of the scene, even that it is the “darkest evening of the year,” a new moon, perhaps winter solstice, and that phrase “the darkest evening of the year” surely starts to resound with other meanings for the speaker of the poem. What other darknesses is he considering? 

“He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake. / The only other sounds the sweep /Of easy wind and downy flake.” After focusing on the visual, zooming out even and seeing himself so far from everything—farmhouse, frozen lake, village…he zooms in here and notices the shake of the harness bells. He listens intently, attempting to continue seeing the oddness of this stopping through the point of view of the horse, his shake of the head a question, the horse also confused to have been forced to do something so out of the ordinary, so unexpected, unplanned, unjustified.

But then he immediately listens more intently still, hearing the “sweep of easy wind and downy flake.” That word “easy” marks a kind of turning point in the poem, the speaker for the first time really allowing himself to be pulled into the power of the moment, a moment he can’t explain using normative, rational, practical logic. “Easy wind,” is, like the event itself, also so unexpected, so new and original, different than the stock human adjectives one might use to describe the wind. “Sweep of” is also striking in this regard, coming perhaps from the whooshing sound of someone sweeping as an image to help him contain and give voice to the sound of the wind. In what sense is this wind “easy”? Using that word in this way helps him give voice to something about this moment that is crucial, that has caused him to pull on the reins and just stop. That phrase, “sweep of easy wind” also has a wind-like feel to it, the “ee” of “sweep” rhyming with the “ea” of “easy,” like the repeating, steady sound of the wind. This pause, this stop, this moment of listening and looking with intensity and reaching to find words to help contain and convey the emotion could well speak to what lies at the very heart of poetic understanding and expression itself. 

Then comes the famous final stanza; “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.” For me perhaps the most striking word in this final stanza is that simple conjunction “but.”  Like that early “though” it sets the whole of the experience, which he now admits has more to do with “beauty” than property ownership, with the powerful “sweep” of the wind, the impossible to hear though he seems to hear it despite this logical fact, sound of “downy flake” —as one at odds with the practical concerns of his life, his “promises to keep.” He will return home, go about the mundane practical necessities of his life, that are set against and oppose this momentary acknowledgment of the “dark, deep” beauty that has momentarily overwhelmed him in the midst of his journey. For me the word “lovely” adheres to “dark,” despite the comma, as if “lovely-dark” were some one, new thing. The lovely-dark, the deep of the forest itself the thing to really consider here—not the human ownership of this place. The repetition of “And miles to go before I sleep” is what really hit me lying there, looking out the window, just coming out of sleep, the whole of the world asleep, it seemed, feeling isolated, alone, far from everything. The speaker of the poem has literal miles to go to return home and crawl into a warm bed, like the warm bed I never fully left, but he also has miles to go before that deeper, darker sleep none of us can avoid. 

As an onslaught of “promises to keep” bear down on me, having “stopped,” having quit a comfortable teaching job without practical or logical justification, bills piling up, not enough cash coming in….it strikes me why the poem comes to mind so often these days. I felt the urgent, inexplicable desire to pull hard on the reins, to stop and look and listen—to write, to think, to consider what I know, what I don’t know, to shift my attention away from the practical toward the poetic, to try to find the “easy sweep” of words, to convey things before facing that final sleep.

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Check out othe recommended and favorite books Here.

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