There’s just enough time for one final Poetry Sunday in 2007, and this one will feature another famous American poet with skeptical leanings: Robert Frost, the New Englander and national Poet Laureate whose work has become so iconic of the American experience.
Frost’s views on God are complex. In some of his letters, he calls himself “an old dissenter”, “secular till the last go down”, and said there were “no vampires, no ghouls, no demons, nothing but me”. In others, he expresses belief in and even fear of God, whom he usually identifies as the wrathful Old Testament deity Jehovah. Still, after twenty years of marriage, his wife said he was an atheist, and he did not deny it. (See Robert Frost: Old Testament Christian or Atheist? for a fuller exploration of Frost’s religious beliefs.)
What I find remarkable is that so many of Frost’s poems, when speaking of people and their relationships, are warm, welcoming, thoroughly humanist. Only when he turns to the subject of God does his poetry become dark and terrifying. Consider poems like “Once by the Pacific“, Frost’s famous vision of the apocalypse, or “A Loose Mountain“, which envisions God as a cosmic destroyer waiting to hurl a meteor at the Earth like a stone thrown from a sling. I think the best way to describe Frost is as a frustrated freethinker, one who never fully shook off the religious indoctrination of his past.
Today’s poem is a classic, described by Frost himself as his favorite. It was first published in New Hampshire in 1923. In a brief description of dark, enveloping beauty, the narrator pauses during a night of travel through a wintry wood to reflect on an absent friend.
Stopping by 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.
Other posts in this series: