Robert Frost's Mastery of Rhyme in His Poetry

Robert Frost was born on March 26th, 1874 to his father, William and his mother Isabelle. Roberts’s father, William, worked as a reporter, while his mother stayed home. Robert was born in San Francisco with his family, until his father passed on May 5th, 1885. After which they moved to Massachusetts, where they would live under the patronage of Roberts’s grandfather. Frost continued on to graduate high school in 1892 and went on to attend Dartmouth College. However, Frost only attended the college for two months. After frost returned home, he went on to have a wide variety of jobs. All of them however, did not suit him and he felt that his true calling was poetry. In 1894, Frost sold his first piece of poetry, “My Butterfly. An Elegy”, which was published in an Edition of the New York Independent. This however, was not Frosts first published poem that was when he was in high school and had wrote one for the school newspaper. Frost eventually moved to Great Brittan with his new wife, Elinor White, and a year later came out with his first book of poetry. Robert frost continued on to write many more poems, and his work is still read by many today.

Robert Frost has become a common name when one talks about poetry; many think of him as one of America’s finest poets, and a leading figure in the Modernist movement. As a Modernist, Frost composes his poems using basic language and experiences of his everyday life to convey hidden layers of ambiguities and meanings. However, unlike his colleagues, Robert Frost favored more traditional metrics and forms of poetry. (Cady) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” being one of Frost’s most well-known poems, perfectly showcases both Frost’s Modernist, and traditionalist qualities. On the surface, “Stopping by Woods” captures a simplistic, visual snapshot of a man stopping to observe the woods on a snowy night. Frost develops the woods as dark, and ominous through imagery and the reactions of the horse. Yet the man, the narrator, still has a strange attraction to the woods, as evident in his calm and serene tone. Ultimately, by setting the woods as a dangerous environment and conveying the narrator’s illogical attraction towards it, Frost explores the alluring dangers of irrational obsession, as well as the struggle between obsession and obligation. Frost first shows the woods with ominousness and a sense of danger through imagery. It should be noted that the basic imagery and language reflects Frost’s Modernist style. For example, the phrase “without a farmhouse near”, is uncomplicated and straightforward, yet it captures the cold solitude of the woods.

The lack of any human construction, even so much as a fundamental farmhouse, serves to enhance the desolation, the “white silence” (Gray), of the wilderness. Frost then continues on to describe the lake as, “frozen”, and “darkest” to the evening. Both phrases give of the similar aura of bleakness. When the two are combined together, the visual contrast between “whiteness of ice and the blackness of the night” (Olgilvie) evinces a starkness that establishes the woods as a dangerous force.

Frost further imbues the ominousness of the forest with the reactions of the horse as the representation of reason, and obligation. In the second stanza Frost introduces the “little horse” to symbolize the rational mind. As the narrator stops near the woods, the horse begins to “think it queer.” In the third stanza, the horse’s hesitation is intensified in its attempts to warn the narrator, by giving “his harness bells a shake” and asking if there “is some mistake.” Horses are often said to have a “sixth sense” that responds sensibly to danger (Keeling); within the poem the horse is able to maintain its self and continue on in the face of the haunting beauty of the wood. The horse’s apprehension signifies that stopping for sightseeing, just before the cold woods is not a rational idea. By personifying the horse, Frost gives it a voice that readers would give weight to. The overall uneasiness of the horse is a conspicuous hint that something is wrong, generating a perilous mood for the forest, and for the cold. Yet the dangers of the forest, along with the horse’s warnings, is offset by the speaker’s perception of the scene as peaceful. Frost expresses the narrator’s satisfactory tone, with pleasant diction that contrasts greatly with the setting. In the third stanza, for example, “easy wind” and “downy flakes” is a representation of relaxation and rest. The term “easy” implies that the narrator perceives the surrounding as comfortable. Similarly, “downy”, which means soft, fine feathers, has a connotation of coziness and sleepiness. In the next stanza, the unusual ascription of 'lovely' to this scene of “desolate woods, effacing snow, and black night” serves to complicate, rather than simplify, the mood when one considers how “pervasive [are] the connotations of dangerous isolation and bleakness.” (Olgilvie) Indeed, the very next phrase, “dark and deep,” juxtaposes with the calming connotation of “lovely.” The disparity between the satisfactory, serene tone and the desolate woods demonstrates the narrator’s blindness to the silent dangers of the forest, which points to his state of obsession, he is so taken by the seductive beauty of the place that he ignores the menace of the surroundings. Unlike his contemporary Modernists, Frost tends to construct his poem with traditional structures. “Stopping by Woods” is no exception; the poem is written in perfect iambic tetrameter and with the rhyme scheme of, aaba/ bbcb/ ccdc/ dddd, without a single forced rhyme.

This combination of flowing rhythms and rhymes “produces a pleasant hypnotic effect” that “increases as the poem progresses.” (Brower) The hypnotic effect helps the reader to connect more with the poem, providing a vicarious experience that replicates the narrator’s fascination with the woods. Towards the last stanza, the repetition of the two lines manifests the theme of irrational obsession versus rational obligation. He claims he still has “miles to go before [he] sleep[s]” - a call for himself to pull out of his temporary stop. The repetition draws reader’s attention to this line, and subtly creates a sense of indecision. The narrator is assuring himself that his obligations are more important by repeating his responsibilities to himself. This suggests that the speaker has, or at least is starting to, engage and resist his obsession by reminding himself of his sensible responsibilities. However, the readers are not told that the call of social responsibility proves stronger than the attraction of the woods, the poet and his horse have not moved on at the poem's end. The feeling of the poet's obsession towards the woods and obligation to a world of 'promises', constitutes the central theme: the struggle between obsession and obligation. Frost starts off by establishing the woods as desolate and stark through arrangement of the natural scene and personification of the horse. He then exhibits the speaker’s fascination towards the dark forest with a serene and satisfactory tone. With the scene of a man stopping by the forest on a cold, wintry night, Frost captures the struggle between emotion-based obsession and reason-based obligation. Of course, the subject of said obsession is up to interpretation. Some critics believe it to be the topic of death, while others hold a more generic view, that the subject of fascination is anything that could be possibly important. After all, according to Frost himself, “The poem is the act of having the thought.” (Gray) The focus of “Stopping by Woods” is meant to be about the process, rather than product; it invites the reader not to simply look at the results of that tension, but to share in the experience of the struggle between obligations and obsessions.