126 PA RT T W O
helped make this poem Frost ’s favorite, “my best bid for remembrance.” Are
these promises driven by love for his wife and family, so hard to fulfill? Or sacred
promises to give his all—he loved the saying “You bet your sweet life!”—so
his work will be “acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord” (he liked this from Psalm
19)? Or promises to himself, to become America’s leading poet?
Frost didn’t write “Stopping by Woods.. .” quite in one go. In draft, his last
stanza said
But I have promises to keep
That bid me on, and there are miles...Given his regenerative scheme, that new word “miles” would ask for yet another
stanza when he “didn’t have another stanza in me, but with great presence of
mind and a sense of what a good boy I was I instantly struck the line out and
made my exit with a repeat end.” And that, as he says in “The Road Not Taken,”
has made all the difference. He never conceded that these closing lines,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep,hint a death wish. Yet even without the Primer’s “if I die,” we hear more than
drowsy mumbling. Repeating “sleep” sends it down or up to another level,
like the “long sleep” in “After Apple-Picking.” For all we know, he ’s stopping
there to this day.
New Hampshire (1923), containing “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve-
ning,” “Dust of Snow,” “Fire and Ice,” and “The Ax-Helve,” won the Pulitzer
Prize, first of four he would receive. The poet kept up farm labor, walking,
hiking, botanizing, and more writing, yet never ceased worrying over his liter-
ary stature. On top of this, family matters impinged: his sister’s dementia, his
wife ’s heart trouble and weariness from births, miscarriages, and infant death,
his son’s suicide, his daughters’ physical and mental disorders. The snow a
crow shook down from a tree could not redeem all that. Instead Frost wrote an
autumn poem, “Bereft,” letting weather say what it could: “Somber clouds in
the west were massed... leaves got up in a coil and hissed.”
With some pluck, Frost finished the title poem of his next book, “West-
Running Brook.” Near Derry a husband and wife talk over the contraries wed-
ding them. “Look, look,”
(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing... )