From today's NPR's
"Writer's Almanac" [Garrison Keillor]):
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On this day in 1923, Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost's favorite of his own poems. Though it's a poem about winter, Frost wrote the first draft on a warm morning in the middle of June. The night before he had stayed up working at his kitchen table on a long, difficult poem called "New Hampshire" (1923). He wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" in just a few minutes, almost without lifting his pen off the page. He said, "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."
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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.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
of a poetry fan, and if not mistaken about the target having written that Mending Wall verse, A. will deign to offer that as poetry goes, his work seems among the more dignified. 'Terrifying' he was not.
