Essay on Setting in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening :: Stopping Woods Snowy Evening

Importance of Setting in  tenia by Woods on a Snowy Evening      The gruntle is winter, the time is night, but, . . .the scene, we are reminded four times over, is a wood. Woods, especially when as here they are lovely, dark and deep, are much more beguiling to Frost than is an open field. In fact, the woods are not still lovely, dark, and deep. Rather, as Frost states it, they are lovely, i.e. dark and deep the loveliness thereby partakes of the depth and darkness which make the woods so ominous. The recognition of the causation of nature, especially of snow, to obliterate the limits and boundaries of things and of his own being is, in large part, a function here of some furtive impulse toward extinction, an impulse no more predominate in Frost than it is in nature. It is in him, nonetheless, impetuous to be acknowledged, and it significantly qualifies any tendency he might require to become a poet whose descriptive powers, however botanically or otherwis e accurate, would be used to deny the mysterious blurrings of time and place which occur whenever he finds himself somehow participating in the inhuman transformations of the natural world.             That need is in many ways the subject of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. As its opening words suggest--Whose woods these are I think I know--it is a poem concern with ownership and also with someone who cannot be or does not opt to be very emphatic even about owning himself. He does not want or expect to be seen. And his reason, aside from being on someone elses property, is that it would apparently be out of character for him to be there, communing but with a woods fast filling up with snow. He is, afterward all, a man of business who has promised his time, his future to other people. It would appear that he is not only a scheduled man but a fairly convivial one. He knows who owns which parcels of land, or thinks he does, and his language has a sort of pleasant neighborliness, as in the phrase stopping by. It is no wonder that his little horse would think his actions queer or that he would let the horse, instead of himself, take responsibility for the judgment. He is in risk of losing himself and his language by the end of the third stanza begins to carry hints of a seductive luxuriousness unlike anything preceding it--Easy wind and downy flake off .