The nights draw in again and the winter equinox gets buried beneath the white noise of Argos adverts, flashing santa’s (in both senses), and the warblings of X-Factor winners dribbling out the radio like turkey-gravy down the chin of an elderly relative. The equinox for me is important as it means the nights stop advancing and start to recede, that cycling season is on its way, as are picnics, short trousers and wasps. I have always felt that the shortest day of the year is a hinge on which the new year rests, waiting to slowly open until it hits the June buffer and slowly closes once again. Winter has been mercifully late this year, a year which (to continue the wheezing Christmas metaphor) is a stocking stuffed with historical events that will take years of unwrapping by pundits, experts, dilettantes and David Starkey.
The equinox is special as it allows a perfect opportunity to re-read Robert Frost’s stab at memorability with his poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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.
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost..
Each year I teach poetry to Access to HE learners, and I like to use this poem in class. There are always arguments over the meaning; of course there is, it wouldn’t be poetry without a few competing arguments. This year was no exception: someone felt that the poem was about someone contemplating suicide, and this shocked people who simply saw a person momentarily mesmerised by the falling snow. Another saw a man staring into America’s future at the start of the 20th Century and saw a complex network of trees and branches competing for space beneath silence. Of course they are all right and all wrong, and one of the greatest gifts poetry gives us, is that the meaning shifts as we shift through time, we relate to a different rider year after year. The poem for me this year, takes me back to the door and again, here is the hinge, a door closed with the tiniest crack of light at the edge, enough to produce a longing, a desire to move forward, away from those lovely, dark and deep trees.
Rumour has it that Frost wrote the poem on the longest day of the year after staying up all night to watch the sunrise. As a writer I see some truth in this rumour, that when you are at the furthest point away from the subject you want to write about, then it starts to happen. How can you write that ditty about the love of your life when they are right beside you? Much easier to capture them on paper when they are away, and you’re padding around the house in just your pants feeling sorry for your-self.
I grew up in the West-Kent area of the North Downs, with their deep woods made up of Ash, Beech and Oak. Thinking about the Frost poem takes me back to around 1986, a year we had heavy snow, and walking with my Father along the thin line between the edge of the woods and the fields on Christmas Eve. We saw a fox emerge from the wood and take the same path as us and we stopped without saying a word to watch this bright orange smudge move against the snow and even though it was cold and night was falling we stayed there for what seemed like an age, until it vanished back into the forest. It fills me with a longing for something long gone, the simple nostalgia for walking with my Father – my breath even drops when I consider this, and I think at some point the fox will emerge on the page, but not yet, even twenty five years later it needs to sit at the edge of memory and continue to distil. But Frost’s poem brings it momentarily back and I am thankful once again to the joy of poetry, and for another equinox.
Then there are the eight syllables per line.
But that’s for another year.
Andrew McDonnell (b.1977) performs his poems with the multi-instrumental group My Dark Aunt. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently the Spring edition of Poetry London and he is currently studying towards a PhD at the University of East Anglia. Andrew recently fulfilled a lifelong ambition: the ownership of a Bianchi racing bike. His life has now improved by 93%.
