"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem written in 1922 by Robert Frost, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery and personification are prominent in the work. It was Frost's favorite of his own poems[citation needed] and Frost in a letter to Louis Untermeyer called it "my best bid for remembrance."[citation needed]
[edit] Overview
Frost wrote this poem about winter in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont that is now home to the "Robert Frost Stone House Museum". Frost had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". He wrote the new poem in just a few minutes[citation needed] and later stated that "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."[citation needed]
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter in the Rubaiyat stanza created by Edward Fitzgerald. Each verse (save the last) follows an a-a-b-a rhyming scheme, with the following verse's a's rhyming with that verse's b, which is a chain rhyme. Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.[1]
[edit] In popular culture
- Quasi-Romantic Composer Randall Thompson, a choral scholar from the early parts of the 20th century, included "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as one of the seven pieces in his choral work, "Frostiana: Seven Country Songs," which was originally performed with Thompson conducting and with Frost in attendance. All of these pieces were based upon texts by Robert Frost including such other notable works of his as The Road not Taken and Choose Something Like A Star. Another Choral Interpretation of this poem was written several decades later by Eric Whitacre, a contemporary American composer whose other choral works include Lux Aurumque, When David Heard, Winter and others. Due to copyright reasons, the text of the composition was re-written by Charles Antoni Sylvestri to comply with the wishes of the Robert Frost estate.
- In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting reported the arrival of President John F. Kennedy's casket to the White House. As Frost was one of the President's favorite poets, Davis concluded his report with a passage from this poem but was overcome with emotion as he signed off.[citation needed]
- The poem featured in the 1977 Charles Bronson film Telefon, the TV show Roswell on episode 17 of season 2, the TV show The Sopranos on episode 2 of season 3, and Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof" segment of the 2007 film Grindhouse.
[edit] References
- ^ As Richard Poirier noted: "In fact, the woods are not, as the Lathem edition would have it (with its obtuse emendation of a comma after the second adjective in line 13), merely 'lovely, dark, and deep.' Rather, as Frost in all the editions he supervised intended, they are 'lovely, [i.e.] dark and deep'; the loveliness thereby partakes of the depth and darkness which make the woods so ominous." (in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, 1977, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0195022165, p. 181)
[edit] External links
