This essay is included my own understanding, plus some information that I gathered from a lot of researches and critics’ comments on this poem. I, myself interpret this poem through the first perspective I would explain about, and in two other perspectives my ideas hardly is included.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"
Complete Text
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.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Summary:
On the surface, this poem is simple. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening. He/she is taken in the lovely scene, is tempted to stay longer, but admits that there is a long distance to travel before he or she can rest for the night.
Interpretation:
First of all it should be mentioned that wherever there are symbolic words in a literary work, there would be numerous different interpretations. In other words, symbolic words make us to interpret a work in so different ways as far as the work permits and supports the interpretation.
In regard to this point, different interpretations on the poem ”Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are inevitable. Because this is a symbolic poem, full of symbolic words such as woods, horse, dark, snow…etc. As far as I researched, it seems that all the interpretations are through three common perspectives, those I explain about one by one, from more dominant to less.
Perspective 1: Life/Beauty
In brief, in this perspective we see the speake...
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... fellows who go ahead and say all sorts of things. He makes my "Stopping By Woods" out a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I'd say, "This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven." There'd be no absurdity in that. That's all right, but it's hardly a death poem.
On the whole we can see this poem (with any interpretation) in a psychological way:
According to Freud we have three parts in our unconscious mind:
1: Superego: represented our conscience and acts against the Id with a primitive and unconscious sense of morality.
2: Ego: the part of your mind with which you think and take action. Ego stands in between the Id and the Superego to balance our primitive needs and our moral beliefs.
3: Id: the part of your mind that is completely unconscious, but that has hidden desires and needs that you try to meet. It is organized around primitive instinctual urges of sexuality, aggression and the desire for instant enjoyment or release.
In this poem:
Superego: the horse
Ego: the Speaker/Frost
Id: the woods
And finally we can say this case is quite like “To be or not to be” in Hamlet.
Majid Olyaei/ Guilan University/ May 13 2005
In the first stanza, first line; I saw two trees embracing, this means that there is a couple that is in love. In the second and third line we see that the male is weaker “one leaned on the other, as if to throw her down” and in the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh line we notice that the female has the strength, willpower and is dominating. In the second stanza, line one, two and three we see that the female being dominant makes the male feel broken and intimidated. In line four “the most wind-warped, you could see”, hear we see that there is a major problem between the two.
The voice of the speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is that of an individual that is stressed out or overwhelmed. He or she just needs to take a mental break from everything and, “stop by the words/to watch [them] fill with snow.” The reader knows that this person needs to take this mental break based upon how long they stay there. He or she stays in the woods so long that their horse “give his harness bells a shake/to ask if there is some mistake.” In other words, the horse is confused; here he stands in these woods “without a farmhouse near [and] the only other sound [he hears, aside from his own bells, are,] the sweep of easy wind and [a] downy flake.” This sense of being overwhelmed, and needing to take a mental break in order to remain sane, is something any reader can relate to, whether they have had a stressful day at work, a parent is using the poem as an example to show a child who has had a temper tantrum that they are being puni...
The ego lies within the conscious and unconscious realm and seeks to satisfy the id’s
ego, and the superego, and that these three properties were constantly in conflict with one
The poem is a combination of beauty and poignancy. It is a discovery in a trajectory path of rise and fall of human values and modernity. She is a sole traveler, a traveler apart in a literary romp afresh, tracing the thinning line of time and action.
- Super ego usually works in contradiction to the id and is structured by culture, family and religion.
The night is a symbol for dark moments of solitude during the speaker’s life. Through being “acquainted with the night” (line 1), the speaker is saying that he is familiar with darkness, proving how symbolism brings out a detached tone with the help of diction, saying that isolated darkness is something the speaker experiences regularly. The exertion of the night as symbolism creates an image for readers to realize that Frost did not actually mean nighttime in his poem; he used the night as symbolism to provide deeper insight and bring the image of our own dark times to describe as “the night”(line 1) just as the speaker of “Acquainted With the Night” did. Symbolism goes on to present itself in line 2, the “rain” is used as a symbol for tears and melancholy. The rain was not meant to be read literally, but rather symbolically as tears, or times of mourning over the harsh struggles in life, just as the speaker did when he “walked out in rain and back in rain” (line 2) meaning he walked into and out of life’s struggles. If the weather is cold and rainy, no one goes outside because of the gloomy clouds and cold rain. Similarly, no one reached out to the speaker in “Acquainted With the Night” during his gloomy periods of “rain”(line 2) or sadness, which expresses
Frost uses different stylistic devices throughout this poem. He is very descriptive using things such as imagery and personification to express his intentions in the poem. Frost uses imagery when he describes the setting of the place. He tells his readers the boy is standing outside by describing the visible mountain ranges and sets the time of day by saying that the sun is setting. Frost gives his readers an image of the boy feeling pain by using contradicting words such as "rueful" and "laugh" and by using powerful words such as "outcry". He also describes the blood coming from the boy's hand as life that is spilling. To show how the boy is dying, Frost gives his readers an image of the boy breathing shallowly by saying that he is puffing his lips out with his breath.
The true meaning of this poem could only be perfectly interpreted by Wilbur, himself. In "Orchard Trees, January," it seems that the interpretation previously given above is correct, although Wilbur may have some different stress points. There probably is an even deeper meaning in this poem that Wilbur could get across, but most of the time it is up to the reader to be able to pick it out and relate it to the poem.
McLeod, Saul. "Id, Ego and Superego." Id Ego Superego. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. .
Keats begins with the poem with a question, “O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering?”. He does this to ask the “knight-at-arms” what has made him this weak, this pale, dying in a field somewhere and the knight’s answer takes up the rest of the poem. The imagery in my visual representation depicting a heart broken and weakened by the icy, deceptive lips of ‘femme fatale’ is both powerful and highly symbolic because it expresses the coldness and the deviousness of the deceptive witch that has weakened the knight. The icy cold lips of the witch symbolise her deceptive nature, and the way she tricks the knight into a deathly sleep, which is also visualised in my representation. His deathly sleep is also represented in a ‘before/after’ representation in which an image of the beautiful woman in the meadows is shown, and after his nightmare, the icy cold, desolate and dark hill side upon which the knight awakes is shown in the neighbouring image. The speaker says that the "sedge" have all died out from around the lake, and "no birds sing”. We can deduce that it 's autumn since all the birds have migrated, and the plants have “withered." The speaker continues to address this sick, depressed "knight at arms." He asks about the "lily" on the knight 's "brow," suggesting that the knight 's face is pale like a lily.
The id and superego are on two opposite ends of the spectrum, and they are polar opposite to another, but they each live inside humans. The id is the primal instincts of one’s self it has; it is the
"Stopping by Woods" The visible sign of the poet's preoccupation is the recurrent image of dark woods and trees. The world of the woods, a world offering perfect quiet and solitude, exists side by side with the realization that there is also another world, a world of people and social obligations. Both worlds have claims on the poet. He stops by woods on this "darkest evening of the year" to watch them "fill up with snow," and lingers so long that his "little horse" shakes his harness bells "to ask if there is some mistake." The poet is put in mind of the "promises" he has to keep, of the miles he still must travel. We are not told, however, that the call of social responsibility proves stronger than the attraction of the woods, which are "lovely" as well as "dark and deep"; the poet and his horse have not moved on at the poem's end. The dichotomy of the poet's obligations both to the woods and to a world of "promises"--the latter filtering like a barely heard echo through the almost hypnotic state induced by the woods and falling snow-is what gives this poem its singular interest.... The artfulness of "Stopping by Woods" consists in the way the two worlds are established and balanced. The poet is aware that the woods by which he is stopping belong to someone in the village; they are owned by the world of men. But at the same time they are his, the poet's woods, too, by virtue of what they mean to him in terms of emotion and private signification.
The ego determines which desires of the id should be satisfied at the right time. The ego abides by the reality principle (Coon and Mitterer, 2013). The ego uses defence mechanisms such as repression to subdue urges of libido from id which causes anxiety and depression (Weber,...
Then in the last stanza Frost mentions woods again. Even though the narrator has a long way to go he always has enough time to stop and watch the small thing in nature in detail. This goes to show that Frost’s interest in nature is very large, and he portrays this through his characters.