I live on a hill, about a mile outside our town. Our road is an old, winding one, the kind where if you meet another car, in order for both of you to pass someone has to reverse until they reach new space (not always easy on account of the winding) or at least one party has to drive themselves into the ditch and hope for the best. About halfway, there’s a particularly sharp curve, and there, on your your left, lies a beautiful, upward-sweeping field. In the summer, its borders are a haze of mayflower. In the winter, if you were to pass that field on a day when it was snowing, it would be like the woods in this Robert Frost poem, you would want to stop and just inhale the sight of it.
The Magpie by Claude Monet
And if I did, I’m sure my first thought would be the same as the first thought of this poem - can anyone see me standing here in the snow staring at a field like an eejit? Because if they did, there is a fair chance they would conclude I’m maybe a bit odd. And everyone knows, whether they admit it or not, and no matter the importance of being yourself and all of that, that it’s a good idea most of the time not to stand out. At least around here, to do anything without a clear and rational purpose is to draw attention to yourself. And that never feels like a great idea.
In that sense, this poem feels very Irish to me, or at least very rural Ireland ish. But that’s probably just because that happens to be my world. I bet someone living in Yorkshire or Russia, or New Hampshire of course, would get this too. The way it begins feels very ‘locally true’ to me too, the neighbour-on-the-road-like hesitancy almost in how it cuts in - a poem with good manners, like it’s getting the measure of your attention or your mood before going further.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
Cobourg 3 + 1 More by Peter Doig
And then it goes on (it has decided you are interested):
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
This is the whole concern of the poem, on it goes into its two-stanza middle - the risk of being perceived as ‘queer’ as he wonders what his little horse must make of it all, in lovely lines falling:
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.
Winter Landscape by Wassily Kandinsky
Part of how delicious this moment is, I think, is the purity of this stolen moment of leisure (aren’t they all stolen, from the never-ending road of chores, even writing this when I should be doing a million other things). The horse’s mild disconcertedness is nothing in itself, but it serves to remind us that really this experience ought not to be happening at all (and thereby deepens its pleasure). At the same time, it’s showing that such moments, when we stop doing what we ‘ought’ to do is a moment when we are most human, it’s sort of why we’re here if there’s a reason at all, to stop and marvel and love our world.
It’s the deepened note of course of the last verse too:
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.
In an interview I was lucky enough to attend (on Zoom, back during the Covid pandemic), Kazou Ishiguro remarked on how ‘most of us live our lives in the servile condition’. Promises to keep and always miles to go. It’s probably always going to feel stolen and odd when we do something un-servile - whether it be taking in the beauty of falling snow or concerning ourselves with people we made up and their imaginary problems (I’m looking at you, trying to write fiction). But if we don’t …
