Wednesday

29 March 2017

— a solitary dove pecking up the seeds on the patio

Good Morning All,

We had gotten to: the eyes and expressions of some of the students were rejecting the suicide-interpretation of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The eyes of most of the others showed, certainly, they were entertaining the possibility. It seemed to me that in some of their faces was—if not fear—some anxiety. They seemed to be asking: Is it possible to have a disguised conversation with yourself without knowing it? Other faces looked intrigued by that possibility, that language could be used in that subconsciously metaphoric fashion.

We kicked it all around a little longer, and I did hear a muttered bullshit or two. Some nervous kids wanted Teacher to supply the definitive interpretation, but Teacher said there were no definitive interpretations. Only defended interpretations. 

I pointed out we still had to figure out, if possible, why this poem was and remained so extraordinarily popular. I suggested one reason other than the euphony of the poem and the reassuring beauty/duty theme, could be that  it works like a mini-short-story. It has a setting, the woods in winter. It has four characters, two of them—the owner of the woods and the person to whom the speaker has made promises—present only in the speaker’s mind; the horse, which seems to be functioning as the speaker’s conscience, and the speaker/protagonist himself. It has plot: snow falls, bells shake, etc. It has conflict: stay and enjoy the beauty or get on with obligations. It has resolution: the speaker enjoys the beauty a bit and then reminds himself to get going, which would be a kind of compromise that would make most readers declare a happy ending.

But would that be enough to make it so popular? Much as nearly everyone loved a good story, the students and I had our doubts. So, hey, just for the sake of the argument, I’d say then, let’s say the poet or the speaker or both were writing/speaking a poem on the subject of suicide, whether or not they were aware of so doing. How might that affect readers' fondness for the poem?

One of the best students—or, occasionally, I—would point out that it might depend upon whether the readers themselves realized it was a poem about suicide.

I’d ask what if they did not? After all, one of the most taboo subjects in our Western culture is suicide. Okay, it can be talked about in reference to other people, whether someone riddled with unending cancer pain had the right to it, or something like that, but not in reference to self. To think seriously about ending one’s own life … no, let’s not go there!

So, someone reads a disguised poem on the subject of suicide in which the speaker has a chat with himself and decides to go on living. The speaker decides to do so in part because life around him is so beautiful. And the reader says afterwards, as millions of readers have, “God, what a beautiful, peaceful poem. It makes me feel so calm, so relieved somehow.” Those are typical sentiments in the wake of this poem about a guy all alone in a cold, dark wood!

"Okay, what did Frost say?” a student asks. “What did he think the poem means?”

“You think he’d have a better idea what it meant than you or me?” I ask in return.

“Why not? He wrote the thing, after all,” the student says. “If anyone knows, he ought to know.”

“Maybe,” I say, “although I’ve never been convinced of that. A lot of poets say if you know where you’re going in the process of writing a poem, it probably won’t be much good. But I can say that someone at another of his public readings did stand up and say to him, ‘You do know, sir, your poem Stopping by Woods is about suicide, don’t you?” Frost, looking surprised, but not unpleasantly surprised, took a moment to respond, saying then, “Well, no, I didn’t, but I did feel it had one of the big dark things in it.”

“So," I’d say then, “just for the argument, a poet has a chat with himself about suicide without knowing it; a speaker has a chat with himself about suicide without knowing it; the reader has a chat with himself or herself about suicide without knowing it, and in all three cases there is a happy resolution. That would certainly provide a compelling reason for why so many people love the poem. 

"But, okay, I also know that all this might actually be bullshit, that we humans are incapable of having serious chats with ourselves without being aware of it, but the poem does raise some questions in that regard, and that’s why—to answer Jens’s original question--I think there is more in this poem than in our prose version of it.

By that point, I was never sure how many of the students agreed with the secret-suicide interpretation, but I did feel that most of them were at least considering it, such that I felt a fair amount of job satisfaction.

If there was time, I'd wrap it up by mentioning a letter I’d gotten from Andreas Frisch a few years after he graduated. He was in the Swiss Army and not enjoying it. He wrote that on the previous afternoon he and a hundred other soldiers had been running across a field with their bayonets pointed at straw men near the top of the field. They were all yelling Kill! Kill! All except Andreas, that is. He was, as he reported, yelling: “Whose woods these are I think I know…”

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron