Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Frank Bernhard

Critical Essay by Frank Bernhard

SOURCE: Bernhard, Frank. “Frost's ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’” Explicator 40, no. 4 (summer 1982): 43-45.

In the following essay, Frank provides a psychological interpretation of the speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

Like the snake, a poem may slough off some of its more overt meanings and survive brilliantly in a new skin. The first level interpretation of Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” that of an exaltation of nature's beauty, has long since lost its allure; and the death-wish interpretation, too, has been overworked. It has recently been modified into a “little death” as opposed to the “big death” of the suicide wish. “… If there is any death in the poem,” writes Nat Henry, “… it is the little death of abnegation to which we sentence ourselves daily because of what we owe to those who depend on us...
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