MOD#10-Response

MOD#10-Response

You are free to focus on a particular aspect you found intriguing. Moreover, if you feel like making an argument of some kind, you can use this as a guide throughout your response paper as well (i.e. if I argue that the red leaf is symbolic of blood, then I would show evidence from the text and provide analysis as to why I believe this).

Here is the reading this essay is based off of.

ROBERT FROST
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost (1874–1963) was perhaps the best-known poet of the twentieth century: winning four Pulitzer Prizes, garnering more than forty honorary degrees, and being widely anthologized throughout the world. His popular image, perhaps forever fixed by his reading at John Kennedy’s inauguration, is of a white-haired New Englander fond of simple, homey descriptions of nature. Actually, Frost was born in San Francisco, and most critics think his poetry is anything but simple.

Frost spent his early childhood in California and later moved with his mother to eastern Massachusetts, where he grew up in the small city of Lawrence. He briefly attended Dartmouth College and married in 1895. Frost and his wife taught school together, but they soon moved to a farm in New Hampshire, where he worked and wrote poetry. In 1912, he moved to a town outside London and soon published his first book of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in 1913. The book was well received, and a few years later Frost moved to Franconia, New Hampshire, and began a lifelong career of writing and teaching. For more than twenty years, he was a professor at Amherst College and for decades taught summers at the Bread Loaf School in Vermont.Frost’s most popular poems — “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Birches,” and “Fire and Ice” — and those printed here deal with complex social issues in a seemingly natural manner. But even a casual search of essays interpreting “Mending Wall,” for example, demonstrates that critics see in Frost’s poems a sophisticated, searching, and often dark commentary on the human condition.

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 sound’s 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. [1923]