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Angela Fields

Stephanie Dowdle Maenhardt Ph. D

English 2600

7 September 2017

 

Sim grew upon himself. He felt the digestive-eliminatory movements of his body. He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding. He began to fit words to images and processes. Such a word was “love.” It was not an abstraction, but a process, a stir of breath, a smell of morning air, a flutter of heart, the curve of arm holding him, the look in the suspended face of his mother. He saw the processes, then searched behind her suspended face and there was the word, in her brain, ready to use. His throat prepared to speak. Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.

            He sensed the expansion of his fingernails, the adjustments of his cells, the profusion of hair, the multiplication of his bones and sinew, the grooving of the soft pale wax of his brain. His brain at birth as clear as a circle of ice, innocent, unmarked, was an instant later, as if hit with the thrown rock, cracked and marked and patterned in a million crevices of thought and discovery.

             His sister, Dark, ran in and out with the other little hothouse children, forever eating. His mother trembled over him, not eating, she had no appetite, her eyes were webbed shut.

            “Sunset,” said his father, at last.

The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.

 

            Ray Bradbury, author of numerous works of fiction, published the story “Frost and Fire” in the Planet Stories magazine in the fall of 1946, then titled “The Creatures That Time Forgot." The passage above takes place in the center of section three after Sim, as a baby, and his family had left the cave they had to reside in for the hours of morning before the sun blazed and scorched the world outside. The planet being one of which time was greatly expedited to the point humans would be born, grow up, and die in a mere eight days. Because of this tragic reality the people of this planet pursue life with vigor and a pressing urgency.

 The story is written in the third person limited. The main character, Sim, will experience growing up, losing his parents, falling in love with a girl named Lyte, have a rival, war, and be put through physical tests of both body and mind. The narrative explanation of events gives the readers all the aspects of this world and the feelings many of the characters within it are going through in each short stage they are allot in their lives just as we allot time in our daily routines. Because of this comparison, this analysis will meld Reader Response, Formalist and Marxist Criticisms to illustrate how this work evokes strong feelings within readers by the containment the characters experience in this fictional world while also becoming a reflection of our own.

The structure of the passage follows an order much like the rest of the story where in the beginning we are being brought on the journey of development through a stream of consciousness and at the opening of the story a landslide of events that immediately grabs us in a situation that is full of disorder and uncertainty. We are then brought to a more even flow when his brain develops to a point of reason and understanding. This steady flow could be said to follow next in the passage as an order in the growth of the human body in comparison to the routine of societal actions and need to leave the cave for survival and to feel a brief freedom, a relief to the hardship of their lives. Finally, a conclusion is given in a single word whose metaphoric synonyms say it all-- ‘Sunset,’ followed by the line, “The day was over.”  It was implied here with the description of the mother not eating and having ‘webbed eyes,’ that this time is one of the end for one generation to allow the new one to take its place.

These instances happen in everyday life and are an unavoidable baseline of all human existence. This part of the story attempts to give the reader an understanding of the ‘processes’ that such a quick development would take, a montage of life and understanding of existence that takes place in hours rather than years. The basic functions of the human body represented in this passage also brings us back to these fundamentals in a way that illustrates them to be at our core. Even if we don’t always recognize the spectacular miracles of creation they are, we sync up despite the ‘cracks and crevices’ we each have--a complexity of our species.

Going line by line we start with a short statement placed before a long explanation; “Sim grew upon himself.” This line gives us the point of view, a theme of growth that the reader continues to see either physically, emotionally, or mentally through the characters of the story, in the scene as a whole in the story and metaphorically as we may see outside it within ourselves over time. The second line gives us a basic process he is able to sense mentioned before and is followed then by, “He was fed every minute, he was continually swallowing, feeding.” In structure each sentence has been longer than the last, and the last longer than the first which gives this line more emphasis in the meaning of growth and feeding the reader with more description.

The forth there is a comparison to the growth of the body to the growth of thoughts in the mind with the formation of words tied to images and action. “Love,” the first word Sim gives as example in line five, is both a foreshadow of a major conflict Sim would face in his rushed future as well as an indication to the conclusion where a common saying can describe the sub theme of “love conquers all.” The next line is a string of metaphors to describe love using multiple subordinate clauses because no one can fully fit a word so vast. The connection a child has to a parent shown through this psychic link between Sim and his mother helps the readers understand how a person can develop such complex understandings so young. It also shows how humans that have crashed on this planet have been able to build their knowledge that ultimately saves Sim and Lyte and many humans living on this planet. This is a lot like how humans can, but sadly not always, learn from our histories. The final two lines of this section continue to drive the reader and narrator forward in the fast pace that everyone is prompted to feel and act on just to keep up with the events of everyday life.

The first line of the next section is again a string of adjustments of body and can be said to be each when linked to other parts of the section and passage above. Exposition with more detail of the human circumstance on this planet. Development because without this growth we would not be lead to a change in plot where the change in generation happens literally overnight and the sad fact Sim is about to lose both his parents. And lastly, with such a conclusion a brief denouement with the change of brain function in the next line indicating the end of childhood ignorance/’innocents’. The metaphor of the brain being struck like a smooth sheet of ice with a rock also foreshadows the many conflicts Sim and all of us will ‘discover’ in our futures. It could also be implied that these ‘million crevices’ could represent the many thoughts each of us have every day or paths/choices each of us can take throughout life.

The end of discovery in this passage is death and is juxtaposed in the final lines describing his sister Dark and himself growing up and feeding on life next to his trembling mother who had lost her appetite and struggles to see and to stand one final time to see the last light of the day. Along with the idea of a day ending and the previous image of children at play and parents dying, we are given an ‘at last,’ indicating a kind of acceptance to the fate they share on this world that all of us must eventually realize. The last two lines of this passage stating it clearly, “The day was over. The light faded, a wind sounded.” A reader may even compare the wind that sounded to that of a death knell which every person releases upon death, a release of the final breath or the sound of a tolling bell.

The overall conflict and theme of this passage, for the story and society as a whole, is time. We have so little of it. Even with all the smaller conflicts we struggle with each day, time alone is what we are always ultimately fighting for or against. A line from the passage that conveys this is, “Life was pushing him, rushing him along toward oblivion.” Ray Bradbury has been my favorite author ever since I read The Martian Chronicles in middle school and since then read nearly everything he ever wrote. His work explores not only the cosmos, the human condition, but also the boundaries of the human mind. 

 

 

Work Cited

 

“Planet Stories v03n04 (1946 Fall) : Free Download & Streaming.” Internet Archive, Sketch the Cow, 31 Dec. 2015, archive.org/details/Planet_Stories_v03n04_1946-Fall. Accessed 8 Nov. 2017

 

Angela Fields

 

Stephanie Dowdle Maenhardt Ph. D

 

English 2600

 

7 September 2017

 

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1922)

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

Though Robert Frost is well known for many of his poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is just one example of his ability to use sound to create image, image to capture a moment, and a moment to elicit a feeling. It was written, “on a summer morning in 1922. After staying up all night he saw the sunrise and wrote a poem about a snowy evening as if he said, ‘he had seen a hallucination’” (Campbell). Being that this poem is about a wintery scene but was written in summer, the idea that Frost had hallucinated the idea before writing it fits the vivid, yet dream like images it provokes in its readers. It moves us through the narrator's hesitation to leave after taking in the snowy landscape, while then personifying his horse as a method to drive the poem to its conclusion which pushing the narrator to fulfill his obligations.

 

A common saying is “work before play” which could easily some up one principal theme in this poem. We could also say then another theme is that we should take a moment every now and again and simply take in our surroundings but not lose sight so easily on our road ahead. The poem also creates a feeling of longing, given by the narrator to explore the vast white folds of a place that does not belong to him and also of a slight mischief by pausing to it, in this contemplation. There is also a theme of four in this poem both in image and in verse. Frost wrote it to contain four stanzas, each of which is a quatrain (containing four lines). It is also written in iambic tetrameter, which means each line contains eight syllables broken into four feet. All of these choices were likely intentional, to both assist with the image of the four-legged horse as well as the internal brisk pace of the poem. By using a literacy methods to theorize using primarily formalist criticism, but also in small ways, types such as reader-response and structuralism, we see how its use of sound gives the reader a feeling of this pace, both slowing down and speeding up, affording the poem its overall change in moods.

 

The poem starts off with, “Whose woods these are I think I know.”(line 1), which gives us the many ‘s’ and ‘w’ sounds bringing us to slow down with the sounds along with the narrator in his opening mental hesitation, seeking the name of the person whose land they are now crossing. This pattern in sound continues with the second line, “His house is in the village though;”(line 2) where we are given a hint to the land's owner finding out it is a male and that he lives in the village. The ‘s’ sounds continue to slow us down with the end ‘oh’ sound in ‘though.’ Mary Oliver points out, in her analysis of this of poem that, “One can scarcely read these lines in any other than a quiet, musing, almost whispered way.” (Oliver, page 24) The next two lines read “He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.”(lines 3 and 4), which contains an internal rhyme of “will” and “fill.” This may have been done due in part because these two lines do not exclusively rhyme as the first two did to help with the flow/ reading, since he could have easily written it as “can” instead of “will.” The use of “will” gives the readers a hint that the narrator is arguing to himself on why it is ok for him to stand here and admire the woods filling up with snow despite it not being his land since he won’t be seen. The lack of punctuation at the end of line three makes it so these two lines are connected, starting with this excuse of why he won’t be caught for what he continues to write his reason for stopping.

 

Among the four lines of the first stanza there is a pattern of double letter in, “woods,” “village,” “will,” “see,” “stopping,” “woods,” repeated, followed with the final, “fill.” The use of so many words containing double letters may represent the two minds the narrator has at this point of the poem. This also may be intentional since the words with double letters continues through the rest of the poem with, “little,” “queer,” “between,” “woods,” used for a third time, “harness,” “bells,” “sweep,” a fourth and final use of “woods” (again a pattern of four), “deep,” “keep,” “sleep,” found at the end of both last lines. This double pattern up to this point, is then overemphasized by the repetitions and closure to the poem with the repetitive lines.

 

In the next stanza, we begin to gain some personification of one of the many strong images in the poem--the horse. It is attributed with being little, as well as the narrator’s projection of potential feelings on why they have stopped in the line “My little horse must think it queer.”(line 5) The second line continues with the reason for the horses’ confusion being that they have done so, so far from a farmhouse with, “To stop without a farmhouse near.”(line 6) The word “stop,” in this line instead of “cease,” “halt,” “pause,” “park” or even, “end” gives connection to the former “s” sounds and ends in a mute which better relays the action. The line flows from that point on, but the use of that word versus another gives the line a halting feeling coupled with a sound that has become prevalent. Next, we are given, “Between the woods and frozen lake,”(line7) which gives a softer “z” sound, which some may argue begins to imply the final idea of sleep. This stanza does not offer any punctuation until the end after the line, “The darkest evening of the year.”(line 8) The “d” sound in “darkest,” may also be a foreshadowing of the “d” sounds found later in the poem with, “sound,” “wind,” “downy,” “dark,” and “deep.”

 

In the third stanza we begin with, “He gives his harness bells a shake”(line 9) which is rife with the same “s” sounds continuing this feeling of serenity matching the scene until we hit the “k” in shake, again the use of the word applying the action. The sound of the bells, the sound of the “k” within the word and the meaning of the word all works together to break us away. This sound is again repeated in the next line of, “To ask if there is some mistake.”(line 10) in “ask” and “mistake,”  though only for a moment. This is the moment when the horse tries to snap the narrator back to reality but he just as quickly drifts back into it with the line, “The only other sound’s the sweep.”(line 11)

 

Again, the “s” returns in “sound’s” and “sweep”, carrying us back to this quiet moment the narrator is enjoying, looking over his snowy surroundings. By lacking punctuations, we move accordingly, sweeping into the last line. To finish this stanza, “Of easy wind and downy flake.”(line 12) which uses the word downy to demonstrate how soft and fluffy the flakes of snow seem. The “d” in downy has three effects within this poem here. First, it duplicates the “d” in “darkest” we saw in the previous stanza. Second, it also foreshadows both the impactful words found in the next line of “dark and deep.” And finally, it can be imagery that we can correlate to that of a pillow, which makes it flawless in Frost’s intentional use of the word, then becoming the new need the narrator has developed, that of a want to sleep, which we hear clearly in the final two lines. There is also a repetition of “w” in “wind” and the more silent one in “downy” within this line along with that of the line before having it in “sweep” and the one in the next line of “woods,” nicely tying it all together. This sound sensationalizes with the “s” sounds, to call to us with the common whispers wind can create.

 

The last stanza has one of the most rhythm driven lines in the poem, being the first with, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”(line 13) Frost’s use of punctuation in the middle of this line, being the only line to have one, slows down its reading tremendously. We can fully grasp within this moment the narrator's complete love of what he is witnessing, taking that extra-long pause to take it in. We can get the sensation that if it were not for his need to move on, both for his horse and for his unknown obligation that we discover in the next line, he may well have stayed longer. The heavy sounds of “dark and deep,” may also be used to indicate the heavy sleep he also longs for, and the heavy pace he must continue. We also have a repeat of the word “dark” just as we had been given from the last line of the second stanza, before the break in the narrator's slight meditation with the sound of the bells.  Almost as promised with that repetition of “dark,” beginning on the next line, we are snapped back again with sound with the intrusive “B” in “But” being much harder an opener then we have had in most of the previous lines. The line reads, “But I have promises to keep,”(line 14) in which we again get a “k” as from before in the third stanza with “shake,” “ask,” “mistake,” and “flake.” Since the word begins with the “k” instead of ends with it, we may be able to interpret it as his need to move on is greater than his ability to stay.  All the lines in this stanza also end in pauses with its punctuation of three commas and one period, possibly providing us with the slow pickup of pace he has when moving on.  Our third and fourth lines read the same, “And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.”(lines 15 and 16) These lines give the narrator's final lament of his leaving. They also contain the common alliteration of the “s” sounds but also the new “b” in the two “befores” which may again continue the pickup in pace by their usage. You can almost hear as the horse's head bows down to pull them on.

 

So much is going on within this poem, I can scarcely reach it all. Between the connections of word choice, to sound effects of alliteration, to internal patterns of structure and symbolism, this poem is so richly complex my contemplations of it can’t compare to its depth of meaning to me. The rhyme scheme is aaba bbcb ccdc dddd. This pattern seems to fit creating that second to pause, to see with that break in the pattern of four before the flow continues within each stanza. It is profoundly “lovely,” this painting Frost creates for us in this work. Frost also illustrates his talents of doing this in some of his other works such as “An Old Man’s Winter Night” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” All of these poems this one included, may well have an arching theme of youth followed by the eventual age many of us will pass through or at least a focus on one or the other. If found in this one, we can see it with the possible subtle hint of mischief in this first stanza, followed later with the narrator's indication of being tired, commonly both adjectives being associated with youth and age. Even a well-known poet such as Mary Oliver marvels at Frost’s ability to craft such a piece that relies so heavily on sound when she says,

 

Frost kept no jottings about sound while he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He did not need to. He was a master poet. The poem is an extraordinary statement of human ambivalence and resolution. Genius wrote it. But more than one technical device assisted, the first of which is an extraordinary use of sound. (Oliver, Page 28)

 

Though Frost may have found these words through a “hallucination,” the emotions it elicits within many of its readers, through his mastery of sound to create the images, surely are not.

 

 

 

Work Cited

 

 

 

Campbell, James Colin. “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.” YouTube, YouTube, 21 Apr. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=41&v=hfOxdZfo0gs. Accessed 9 Sept. 2017.

 

Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.