Tweetspeak Poetry

By Heart: “Stopping by Woods” + New Herrick “Delight in Disorder” Challenge

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A woman wearing socks bedazzled with s’mores joined our monthly poetry-reading group that grew out of a poetry class I taught last fall. She announced that for the last, oh, who knows how many years, she goes to sleep every night by reciting from memory “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost.

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

“I have the picture book,” my new friend said, “with illustrations by Susan Jeffers.”

I let out a squeal of delight because I have it too.

“Mine is autographed,” she added, because when she taught elementary school in 1978 in Colorado Springs, Jeffers visited the school to do a reading. Hence, autographed copies were made available.

Alas, my copy, purchased at a large chain bookstore twenty years ago, has no autograph.

It appears my friend and I have the original printing of this picture book version of the poem. The newer one has more color. I like ours, with austere black and white that invites readers to search for the animals hidden in the snow. Ours does have muted color splashes for the jolly narrator, but in the new edition he’s a little too jolly for my taste.

This is a book I had often read to my children at bedtime, but I never thought to read it to myself. Until Mrs. S’mores Socks showed me the way. So this month, in addition to doing my afternoon poetry memorization with a cup of tea, either outside or before an open window, I also recorded myself reading the book aloud, page turn by page turn, and listened to the recording as I drifted off to sleep.

I memorized the poem in about a week. It’s hard to say whether it was the twice-daily repetition or whether, since it was familiar, it had already halfway hidden itself in my heart.

Although this is a winter poem, it was written in the summer. Frost had been working all night on another poem, “New Hampshire.” Then he went out, saw the June sunrise, and wrote this. The legend is that he wrote it all at once. The Writer’s Almanac records, “He said of the experience, “It was as if I’d had a hallucination.”

Frost’s drafts say otherwise.

Here’s another version of the story, from a different edition of The Writer’s Almanac:

More than 20 years later, in 1947, a young man named N. Arthur Bleau attended a reading Frost was giving at Bowdoin College. Bleau asked Frost which poem was his favorite, and Frost replied that he liked them all equally. But after the reading was finished, the poet invited Bleau up to the stage and told him a story: that in truth, his favorite was “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He had written the poem based on his own life, he said. One year on December 22nd, the winter solstice, he realized that he and his wife wouldn’t be able to afford Christmas presents for his children. Frost wasn’t the most successful farmer, but he scrounged up some produce from his farm, hitched up his horse, and took a wagon into town to try and sell enough produce to buy some gifts. He couldn’t sell a single thing, and as evening came and it began to snow, he had to head home. He was almost home when he became overwhelmed with the shame of telling his family about his failure, and as if it sensed his mood, the horse stopped, and Frost cried. He told Bleau that he “bawled like a baby.” Eventually, the horse jingled its bells, and Frost collected himself and headed back home to his family. His daughter Lesley agreed that this was the inspiration for the poem, and said that she remembered the horse, whose name was Eunice, and that her father told her: “A man has as much right as a woman to a good cry now and again. The snow gave me shelter; the horse understood and gave me the time.”

We are one month into a new year. There will be sunrises worth staying up all night to see. There will be drives during which we will have a good cry (the car will understand, though not as well as a horse). There will be more than enough poems for however miles we have to go before we sleep.

Make a resolution for 2019 — it’s not too late! — to memorize just one poem.

And why not this one? You probably already know the last two lines.

Record it and listen to it at bedtime. Let us know when it’s buried deep in your heart’s newfallen snow.

(Note the spontaneous sound that passed my window just as I read the final “and miles to go before I sleep.”)

Your Turn

Did you memorize “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” this month? Join our By Heart community and share your audio or video using the hashtags #ByHeart and #MemoriesWithFriends and tagging us @tspoetry. We also welcome photos of your handwritten copy of the poem.

By Heart for February

For the next By Heart gathering, February 22, we’ll memorize Robert Herrick’s “Delight in Disorder,” from 1648. This year Tweetspeak is celebrating the Renaissance, so we’re joining the party by memorizing a classic.

Delight in Disorder

A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness;
A lawn about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction;
An erring lace, which here and there
Enthrals the crimson stomacher;
A cuff neglectful, and thereby
Ribands to flow confusedly;
A winning wave, deserving note,
In the tempestuous petticoat;
A careless shoe-string, in whose tie
I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me, than when art
Is too precise in every part.

— Robert Herrick

_______________

Photo by Stròlic Furlàn – Davide Gabino, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Megan Willome, author of The Joy of Poetry.

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“Megan Willome’s The Joy of Poetry is not a long book, but it took me longer to read than I expected, because I kept stopping to savor poems and passages, to make note of books mentioned, and to compare Willome’s journey into poetry to my own. The book is many things. An unpretentious, funny, and poignant memoir. A defense of poetry, a response to literature that has touched her life, and a manual on how to write poetry. It’s also the story of a daughter who loses her mother to cancer. The author links these things into a narrative much like that of a novel. I loved this book. As soon as I finished, I began reading it again.”

—David Lee Garrison, author of Playing Bach in the D. C. Metro

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About Megan Willome

Megan Willome is a writer, editor, and author of The Joy of Poetry: How to Keep, Save & Make Your Life With Poems and Rainbow Crow: poems in and out of form. Her day is incomplete without poetry, tea, and a walk in the dark.

Comments

  2. L.L. Barkat says

    The reading of the picture book: delightful! Hearing the pages turn was especially fun. 🙂 And that poetry friend of yours has inspired me to memorize more poems, so I can have a selection to choose from before I go to sleep at night (I’m working on the rest of “Ulysses” right now, for instance). 🙂

    This time, my memory project has a fun story attached to it. As you know, I’m currently “going bookless,” but not poemless. So when I went to get my car worked on recently, I took a poem with me to memorize: this one!

    Well, the car work was supposed to take about 20 minutes, but it dragged on longer, and I was chatting with the guy behind the counter most of the time, but I was also memorizing this poem. The final time that he said, “Just 10 more minutes,” I said, “You said that a couple of times. I’ve already memorized a poem in the time this has taken!”

    He was doubtful. “Say the poem,” he challenged. There was another guy sitting there, scrolling on his phone, and he looked up at this opportunity to hear, perhaps, a poem recitation.

    So I smiled, hoped I really had it memorized, then recited the poem. And the counter guy was quite taken with it. “Wow, that was really good,” he said. “Did you write that?”

    Hee. 🙂

    Mr. Phone Scroller laughed. “No, that’s Robert Frost.”

    And thus, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” was mine, and then doubly mine, and then just mine again. 🙂

    Here’s the recording. And I thank you again for the challenge. I’m finding these opportunities to be quite a beautiful and consoling way to use my bookless time.

    https://soundcloud.com/l-l-barkat/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening

    Reply

    • Laura Brown says

      I love it that the guy asked you to prove it, and the guy who stopped scrolling recognized it. This reminds me a little of your “Poetry at the IRS” artist date. May there be more random public poetry encounters.

      Reply

      • Megan Willome says

        I thought of the poetry at the IRS too. I cracked up that the one guy thought you wrote one of Frost’s classics. Glad the other guy could set him straight.

        So glad that poetry is still a part of your life, that you’re still learning it by heart, even though books have been set aside for the moment.

        Reply

    • Sandra Heska King says

      Maybe it already belonged to Mr. Phone Scroller. And now you’ve introduced it to Mr. Counter Man. I love it.

      This was one my husband recited in bed after he told me he didn’t remember any poems.

      Reply

  3. Laura Brown says

    I love the sock woman, and that she brings show-and-tell items.

    “The car will understand, though not as well as a horse.” 🙂

    We must have spent a lot of time on Frost in the two poetry-heavy American lit courses I took in college, or else I just took a shine to his poems, because I memorized this and a handful of others back then. The few that stuck in memory stayed because I gave them tunes and kept singing them.

    Here’s the 1980s tune.
    https://soundcloud.com/laura-brown-948040045/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-robert-frost-1-for-tweetspeak-poetrys-by-heart-challenge

    But because I thought it a bit … dark, I gave it another tune last week.
    https://soundcloud.com/laura-brown-948040045/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening-2

    Reply

    • Sandra Heska King says

      I love that you make music. How did you remember the first tune (which, by the way, I didn’t think was so dark. I was toe tapping through a lot of it)? Did you actually write out the notes?

      Reply

      • Laura Brown says

        Thank you, Sandra.

        I meant dark in the sense that minor-key music often has a moodier mood. I wanted to see how a major-key tune would change it.

        I remembered that tune the way we remember any tune we’ve learned by hearing and then singing — by heart. It got well filed in the brain. And singing it over the years has kept it current.

        But I reckon we can all do that with music we knew well, even if we haven’t heard it, let alone sung it, in decades. Couldn’t you do the same with a song you knew well in your youth?

        Reply

  5. Katie says

    Oh, Sandy – thank you for your recitation of SBWOASE!
    & Happy Birthday!! I for one say you’re a darn cute seventy;)
    My youngest’s birthday was yesterday as well. A mere twenty-five year old. Have enjoyed “listening” in on the conversation here:)

    Here is another Robert Frost poem I came across this week that I’ve never encountered before:

    Escapist – Never

    He is no fugitive – escaped, escaping.
    No one has seen him stumble looking back.
    His fear is not behind him but beside him
    On either hand to make his course perhaps
    A crooked straightness yet no less a straightness.
    He runs face forward. He is a pursuer.
    He seeks a seeker who in his turn seeks
    Another still, lost far into the distance.
    Any who seek him seek in him the seeker.
    His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.
    It is the future that creates his present.
    All is an interminable chain of longing.

    Happy Weekend all:)

    Gratefully,
    Katie

    Reply

    • L.L. Barkat says

      I’m so impressed! (Lost just one line—”Between the woods and frozen lake.”)

      But? He did this while driving and hasn’t refreshed his memory on this since forever. Absolutely wonderful! (I find it very, very difficult to recite while driving. Trust me, I’ve tried. 😉 )

      Also. No way. No way! You aren’t 70! (You are the youngest 70 I have ever met, and I’m so inspired by you and your continued forays into new life territory. Talk about “shin[ing] in use”! (Yes, I am memorizing “Ulysses.”))

      Reply

  7. Bethany R. says

    Hello, dear TSP Community. I’m enjoying your collection of audio clips and written words here. What a dear place.

    Reply

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