Saturday, March 30, 2013

Can you illustrate the relationship between humans and nature in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"?

In the poem human beings are seen as always in a hurry.
They have places to go and things to do. It is not the norm to stop in the woods. Yet
nature holds a certain allure. A line by line look at the poem can be useful as a means
of illustration:


readability="5">

Whose woods these are I think I
know.
His house is in the village
though;



These are not the
narrator's woods. he is clearly an outsider passing through. In fact, these woods are
uninhabited. Traditionally, a empty wood at night would be a place of fear, but here the
speaker seems not to feel threatened. In fact, he pauses only to consider that as these
woods are not his own and whether or not he should stop on someone else's property,
remarking:



He
will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with
snow.



It is not that the
owner of the woods will or will not mind. He will not see, so he will not know. there is
a bit of an illicitness about the act of stopping, of man disturbing nature with his
very presence, and the horse is the one who is the "witness" to the
act:



My little
horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse
near



The horse is symbolic of
society that looks upon the act of stopping as inconsistent with the norm, but the pull
of nature is too strong for the narrator to resist, even as it brings with is a sense of
possible danger, not only from being caught, but from the elements
themselves:


readability="5">

Between the woods and frozen lake
The
darkest evening of the
year.



Nature presents dangers
in the cold. The man could become sick. A frozen lake can be a deadly trap. Darkness in
the woods holds the possibility of countless dangers. Nature can be either a friend or
an enemy, and in realism nature is usually an obstacle. But Frost was not always in line
with the rest of the realists. The horse, however, seems to think that the man is
tempting fate:


readability="5">

He gives his harness bells a shake
To
ask if there is some
mistake.



He urges the man to
remember that society is waiting, that time is passing by and that he should be moving
on, but nature has its own commentary and corresponding pull to stay a moment
longer:



The
only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy
flake.



In fact, nature seems
soothing here with adjectives such as easy (simplicity in nature as opposed to the
complexities of life in an urbanized world) and downy (reminiscent of a feather bed,
perhaps)



The
woods are lovely, dark and
deep.



They call to him, it
seems. Nature is urging him to take a pause, but he can only comply for a moment before
he returns to the civilized world:


readability="7">

But I have promises to keep,
And miles
to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I
sleep.



Nature may not be
burdened by responsibility, but man is. He must attend to his business before he can
sleep (the first sleep) and he has much that he must do before he dies (the second
sleep) whereas nature, while it does consist of life cycles, has no concept of death or
responsibility. It simply exists. It is not bothered or impressed by the man, but he is
with it.



.

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