16. Desert Places / A Further Range(1936) - Robert Frost

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16. Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast 
In a field I looked into going past, 
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, 
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs. 
All animals are smothered in their lairs. 
I am too absent-spirited to count; 
The loneliness includes me unawares.

smother : 질식시키다, 은폐하다

And lonely as it is that loneliness 
Will be more lonely ere it will be less— 
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow 
With no expression‎, nothing to express.

blank : 공백의

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces 
Between stars—on stars where no human race is. 
I have it in me so much nearer home 
To scare myself with my own desert places.

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적막강산

내가 지나가며 들여다본 들판에,

눈이 내린다, 밤이 내린다, 오, 빠르게,

지면(地面)이 거의 평평하게 눈에 덮이니,

보이는 건 잡초와 그루터기 몇 개뿐이다.

주변 숲이 그것을 소유한다―그것은 숲의 것이다.

모든 동물이 각자의 굴에서 숨을 죽인다.

나 역시 헤아리기에는 너무 얼이 빠졌다.

고독이 부지불식간에 나를 삼킨다.

들판은 고독하지만, 그 고독은

더욱 고독해지다가 줄어들 것이다―

어둠이 깃든 하얀 눈의 공허(空虛)는

표정도 없고, 표현할 것도 없다.

사람이 없는 별과 별 사이―별 표면의

빈 공간에 내가 놀란 것이 아니다.

나는 집과 훨씬 가까운 나 자신의

적막강산에 겁내고 있는 것이다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): “눈이 내린다, 밤이 내린다, 오, 빠르게.” 어느 겨울 혼자 밤길에 나선다. 빠른 속도로 들판과 지면이 까만 어둠과 하얀 눈에 묻히면서 느끼는 심리적 절박감이 고조된다. 동물들도 굴속에서 숨을 죽이고, 숲만이 눈 덮인 외로운 세계를 지킨다. 부지불식간에 공허(空虛)와 고독(孤獨)이 뼛속까지 스민다.

이런 공허와 고독에 인간의 근본적인 취약성이 떠오른다. 우리가 사는 세상은 어둠에 싸인 한 장의 백지와 같은 것인가? 눈은 더 두껍게 강산을 덮을 것이고, 게다가 눈은 어둠이 덮을 것이다. “표정도 없고, 표현할 것도 없는” 백색의 공허가 엄습할 것이다. “나”는 존재했다는 기록도 없이, 그리고 저항 한번 없이, 사라지고 말 것인가? 동면하는 숲의 동물이 오히려 부럽다. 나도 적막강산을 숲에 내주고 숲의 품에 안겨버릴까?

그러나 “나”는 “그 고독은 더욱 고독해지다가 줄어들 것”을 알고 있다. 자신의 상황을 직시함으로써, 비극적 상실감을 극기로 대처하는 여유를 보인다. “나”는 훨씬 더 공허(空虛)한 우주공간을 조소하듯. “사람이 없는 별과 별 사이―별 표면의 빈 공간에 내가 놀란 것이 아니다.”라고 말한다. 황량한 겨울 풍경, 텅 비고, 표정도 없고, 의식도 없는 밤의 들판은 인간의 심리적 공허감을 불러일으키기에 충분하다. 하지만 텅 빈 우주공간에도 겁먹지 않는 “나”가 아무것도 아닌 “삭막한 강산”에 굴복하겠는가?

“그 고독은 더욱 고독해지다가 줄어들 것”이라는 것을 “나”는 안다. 공허와 고독은 상승곡선을 그리다가 결국은 하향곡선을 그린다. 상승과 하향은 자연과 인간질서의 순환법칙 아닌가? 지금은 “나 자신의 적막강산에 겁내고 있지만,” 눈이 그치고 밤이 새면 밝고 청명한 태양이 또 다시 떠오를 것이다.

-신재실 씀-

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Seamus Heaney: On "Desert Places"

Consider, for example, the conclusion of "Desert Places," which I have just quoted: "I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places." However these lines may incline toward patness, whatever risk they run of making the speaker seem to congratulate himself too easily as an initiate of darkness, superior to the deluded common crowd, whatever trace they contain of knowingness that mars other poems by Frost, they still succeed convincingly. They overcome one's incipient misgivings and subsume them into the larger, more impersonal, and undeniable emotional occurrence which the whole poem represents.

I call it an emotional occurrence, yet it is preeminently a rhythmic one, an animation via the ear of the whole nervous apparatus: what Borges called "an almost physical emotion." The tilt of the sound is unmistakable from the beginning. The momentary stay of the stanza is being sifted away from the inside, words are running out from under themselves, and there is no guarantee that form will effect a rescue from danger:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past . . .

This meter is full of the hurry and slant of driven snow, its unstoppable, anxiety-inducing forward rush, all that whispering turmoil of a blizzard. Here the art of the language is like the art of the French farmer in "The Ax-Helve"; what is said in that poem about the lines and grains of a hickory axe shaft applies equally to the lines of "Desert Places." The French farmer

showed me that the lines of a good helve

Were native to the grain before the knife

Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves

Put on it from without.

The curves and grains of the first two lines of "Desert Places" are correspondingly native to living speech, without any tonal falsity. Who really notices that the letter f alliterates five times within thirteen syllables? It is no denigration of Hopkins to say that when such an alliterative cluster happens in his work, the reader is the first to notice it. With Frost, its effect is surely known, like a cold air that steals across a face; but until the lines are deliberately dwelt upon a moment like this, we do not even think of it as an "effect," and the means that produce it remain as unshowy as the grain in the wood:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast

In a field I looked into going past,

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,

But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

This feels like an unpremeditated rush of inspiration, and Frost always declared that he liked to take a poem thus, at a single stroke, when the mood was on him. Yet even if the actual composition of "Desert Places" entailed no such speedy, pell-mell onslaught of perceptions, the finished poem does indeed induce that kind of sensation. There is an urgent, toppling pattern to it all, an urgency created by various minimal but significant verbal delicacies—like, for example, the omission of the relative pronoun from the line "In a field I looked into going past." Compare this with "In a field that I looked into going past" and hear how the inclusion of an extra syllable breaks the slippage toward panic in the line as we have it. Or consider how the end-stopping of the first eight lines does not (as we might expect) add composure to them but contributes instead a tensed-up, pent-up movement:

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.

All animals are smothered in their lairs.

I am too absent-spirited to count;

The loneliness includes me unawares.

And where does that line about being "too absent-spirited to count" arrive from? Does it mean that the speaker does not matter? Or something else? In the onwardness of a reading, such curiosity registers fleetingly, like something glimpsed from a carriage window. To count what? The animals? The lairs? And what is "it" that the woods have? Is it snow? Is it loneliness? The speaker is so hypnotized by the snow swirl that he doesn't count as consciousness anymore, he is adrift instead, in the dream of smothered lairs. And those triple masculine rhymes of "fast" / "past" / "last, " with their monosyllabic stress repeated again in "theirs" / "lairs" / "awares," are like the slowing of the heartbeat in the withdrawn hibernators.

Halfway through the poem, then, the narcotic aspect of the snowfall is predominant, and the vowel music is like a dulled pulse beat: going, covered smooth, stubble showing, smothered. But in the next eight lines we go through the nature barrier, as it were, into the ether of symbolic knowledge. The consolations of being "too absent-spirited to count" are disallowed and the poem suddenly blinks itself out of reverie into vision. The vowels divest themselves of their comfortable roundness, the rhymes go slender first and then go feminine: "loneliness" / "less" / "express"; "spaces" / "race is" / "places." The repetition which at the start was conducive to trance, and included speaker and reader "unawares," now buzzes everybody and everything awake.

Once again, the effect is not "put on from without," not a flourish of craft, but a feat of technique. There is a disconsolateness in the way the word "lonely" keeps rebounding off its image in the word "loneliness"; and the same holds true for the closed-circuit energy of "expression‎" and "express. " Finally, there is a Dantesque starkness about the repetition of the word "stars." Even if these stars are not intended to echo the stelle that shine at the end of each of Dante's visions, they still do possess the cold tingle of infinity. So, by such feats of mimesis and orchestration, the speaker's inwardness with all this outward blankness is established long before he declares himself explicitly in the concluding lines. And that is what I meant earlier when I spoke of the excessiveness of the language's own rightness, brimming up beyond the poet's deliberate schemes and performances:

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less—

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow

With no expression‎, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

From "Above the Brim." In Brodskey, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott (eds.) Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1996. Copyright © 1996.        

Mordecai Marcus: On "Desert Places"

The speaker of "Desert Places" also feels lost and tries to orient himself by the stars, but his circumstances and tone are very different. He goes rapidly past a field, awed by the swift descent of snow and night and disheartened by the smooth white cover over the last traces of vegetation, which presents a temptation to yield, as does much else in the scene, for everything seems gathered in. He participates as he yields the snowy field to the woods, envies the animals in their protective burrows, and feels so absent that he does not even count as part of the scene. "Unawares," used as an adverb to modify "includes," shows that the loneliness acts without thought. The speaker generalizes about the scene: its loneliness will intensify long before any relief arrives. The snow cover will thicken and be covered by night, and will lack physical expression‎ and anything to say, "benighted," describing the snow, puns on both the fall of night and spiritual ignorance. In a slyly abrupt transition, the speaker scorns an unspecified "They" who might wish to scare him by pointing to empty spaces even more frightening than this field--the far reaches of the universe, presumably empty of consciousness. This passage may allude to Blaise Pascal's famous description of his fear when contemplating the infinite spaces between the stars, an emotion that helped restore his lagging religious faith. The "They" who would make such efforts to scare people must be scientists and ministers, the latter anxious to demonstrate God's power and potential refuge. The "nearer home," where the speaker has successfully faced such terrors, is the inner self, as in the phrase to strike home; its "desert places" are moral and spiritual wildernesses. As many critics have noted, "scare," usually applied to children's casual distress, is an understatement emphasizing the speaker's deeply experienced stoicism.

From The Poems of Robert Frost: An Explication. Copyright © 1991 by Mordecai Marcus.

John C. Kemp: On "Desert Places"

"Desert Places" . . . vividly demonstrates the power of the imagination to influence the traveler's perception of the region he observes. "I have it in me," he says (l. 15) of the fear that arises from his bone-and spirit-chilling meditation. As a result of his voyage toward the "blanker whiteness" (l. 11) of his imagination, he can barely continue that other journey across the countryside, at least not in the spirit with which he began. His vision of loneliness will dominate any future travel he undertakes, and we should recognize that this poem may represent a frightening extension of the imaginative journey implicit in "Stopping by Woods." If so, the two works testify to the poet's growing reluctance in the twenties and thirties to launch off on the speculative, figmental explorations that a decade or two earlier had animated such brilliant pieces as "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile."

From Robert Frost and New England: The Poet as Regionalist. Copyright © 1979 by Princeton UP.

Frank Lentricchia: On "Desert Places"

Probably no poem of Frost's so well accommodates the wide emotive swings of self which be probed from early on in his career. In "Desert Places" we watch the speaker go to the brink in his projection; then be comes back to normality, withdraws from dark vision, and rests in the stability of a balanced ironic consciousness. As well as any poem of dark vision that he wrote, "Desert Places" gives evidence of Frost's ability to achieve aesthetic detachment from certain sorts of destructive experience.

. . . .

The figure in "Desert Places,". . .understands that he "scare[s himself] with [his] own desert places"--that the desert places belong peculiarly to him because they are projections of the self.

From Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Copyright © 1975 by Duke University Press.

Judith Oster: On "Desert Places"

This later poem makes a fitting companion piece to "Stopping by Woods." Even the rhyme scheme (aaba) is the same, although in this poem, the poet has not chosen to commit himself to the greater difficulty of linking his stanzas by means of rhyme. This speaker too is traveling through falling snow at night fall. The woods are present in this poem as well, though we are more conscious of their darkness in "Stopping by Woods" and more conscious of whiteness here. While the opening line sounds soothing with its repetition of "s," and "f," and "o," we know as early as the second line that this speaker does not stop, even for a moment—the fields he describes are those he is "going past." What is not presented as frightening in "Stopping by Woods" is frightening in this poem. Nothing here makes one feel that the speaker finds this snowfall attractive, nothing draws him in, for this snowfall does not present a relaxing oblivion; it presents a concrete blankness. Because it is with blankness that he identifies, it presents no escape, only a reminder of self, a self that is not a welcome haven or wellspring. Withdrawal would not be "strategic" and self-preserving. It would be facing a desert.

The open space is surrounded by woods that "have it." They claim it, and the speaker willingly relegates it to them—willing not because of a decision he has struggled to make, but because he is too apathetic, "too absent-spirited to count." The structural ambiguity in this line and its seeming carelessness emphasize his absent-spiritedness, his apathy. We cannot be sure whether "count" is being used in its active sense (to count, to tell what is happening, to reckon up woods, animals and fields) or in its passive sense (to be counted, to count to anything or anyone else). The following line is also enriched by its apparently careless use of "unawares," which could modify "loneliness" or could modify "me." Again, the ambiguous use of the word illustrates that very unawareness, that carelessness that causes us to associate absent-spiritedness with absent-mindedness.

In the third stanza loneliness is in apposition to snow, and just as the snow will cover more and more, will leave nothing uncovered to relieve its smooth unbroken whiteness, so the loneliness will become still more lonely and unrelieved. That same whiteness—snow or loneliness—is what makes desert of a field, helps the woods to "have" the fields in that it obliterates clear boundaries between field and woods, raising, as it does in "Stopping by Woods," the dangerous prospect of boundarilessness. Even when the journey is into one's own desert places, one's humanity or identity is threatened, and loneliness, the apposition suggests, can do this too. What terrifies him so much, however, is not the fact that he is alone, without other people, but that alone with himself he may find nothing—no one and nothing within. Whereas "Stopping by Woods" presented an invitation to the solitude and inertia of snow, this poem presents the attendant fear that once giving in to the self, or going into the self, he will find that the journey has been for nothing. That there is nothing but loneliness, blankness, and absent-spiritedness in the sense of absence of spirit.

The "nothingness" that Frost fears is not the metaphysical void, it is the void he fears in himself. In relating this personal void to the spaces between stars, he suggests that a personal void can have—or seem to have—cosmic proportions, that it can seem at least as important, as vast and as frightening, as anything "out there." This speaker fears the void, but he does not seem, like Wallace Stevens's snow man, to be "nothing himself"; he is capable of beholding what is not there. He is not a man of snow because he has enough feeling to be afraid. His is not yet a "mind of winter," for he can still think about having one, fear that he might discover it if he explores inside himself. He has it "in him"—again, as in "Spring Pools"—the threatening potential of what lies within. The man with the "mind of winter" does not think, but to Stevens there are two kinds of nothingness—"the nothing that is" and "nothing," which is the absence of something. The greater lack is the latter—the absence of imagination in the man who "beholds nothing that is not there." In "Desert Places" the speaker fears blankness "with no expression‎, nothing to express." There is a difference between "nothing to express" and an expression‎ of nothingness, as Stevens has shown us. The fear in the poem is of the former, but the act of the poem is the latter.

For the poet there is an additional terror in identifying his own "desert places" with the blank landscape: it is a "whiteness…with no expression‎, nothing to express." If there is nothing there, nothing showing or growing, if there is no spirit, what will he have to say? This fear of nothing to say was a constant one to Frost. To Untermeyer he once confided "a very damaging secret…The poet in me died nearly ten years ago…The calf I was in the nineties I merely take to market…Take care that you don't get your mouth set to declare the other two [books] a falling off of power, for that is what they can't be…As you look back don't you see how a lot of things I have said begin to take meaning from this?…I tell you, Louis, it's all over at thirty…Anyway that was the way I thought I might feel. And I took measures accordingly…I have myself all in a strong box" (SL 201-2). Having nothing more to say was what he assumed lay behind Hemingway's decision to commit suicide—a motive and a decision Frost defended (LY 294) .

Even worse than having nothing to say, perhaps, is emotional poverty—feeling used up, both by the pain of events in life and by the demands of his art. He once wrote: "[poets] are so much less sensitive from having overused their sensibilities. Men who have to feel for a living would unavoidably become altogether unfeeling except professionally" (SL 300). Whatever the basis, the poem ends with the fear of one's own emptiness, one's own nothingness. To traverse these spaces inside the self is to traverse the barren.

At the same time, though, and characteristically, the fear is expressed with a kind of bravado: "they can't scare me!" The comparison between the interstellar spaces and his own desert places also serves to aggrandize the speaker and the importance of his personal desert. Then, also characteristically, Frost undercuts both the bravado and the self-importance, mainly by means of metrics. Where the speaker tries so hard to show strength the lines end weakly: they are the only feminine rhymes in the poem; the three rhyming lines of the last stanza all have an added, unstressed eleventh syllable: /ez/. The effect in lines 13 and 14 is to undercut the tone of confidence. By the last line, where bravado gives in to fear, the unstressed ending reinforces the fear by sounding weak in the face of what is feared. The XX rhyme concluding the poem also works against a feeling of closure and resolution.

While the whole final stanza has its metrical bumps, line 14 jolts us the most and alerts us to other tensions with and within that line. For example, whereas "spaces" and "places" are both noun objects of prepositions, rhyming what is also structurally parallel, "race is," as a noun subject and verb, seems out of kilter with the other two. To focus more closely, though, on these words is to notice the possible pun "where no human races" and the tensions that produces between the two possible meanings: in one sense, the contrast between a place where people do not race—no rushing, no competition—and a world where the need to go forward quickly and competitively obtains even in one's private desert. Following on this contrast is another: the active verb of one reading— "races"—contrasts with the static "is" of the other, which creates further tensions. Grammatically, the two would be awkward together, as we do not coordinate an active verb with a stative one. Semantically, the difference is related to two conflicting needs: going, doing, rushing to compete and simply being. Such stasis, though, is located where there is no human life (a concept we will take up in another context in chapter 7). Seen this way, the poem presents another version of the conflict between going and stopping, motion and stasis. While in this poem the outward action is not stopping but going past the field (he races?), what inner desert it represents, of course, goes with him, and, as "Stopping by Woods" reminds us, we must go—move, do—if we are to be.

From Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Copyright © 1991 by the University of Georgia Press.

Albert J. Von Frank: On "Desert Places"

The poet sees the snow and the night descending together, black and white, working together to muffle sensation and obliterate perception; yet they work against each other, paradoxically, to heighten perception. The snow works against the night, giving ghastly light whereby to see the darkness, while the fast falling darkness gives urgency to the need to see, for the opportunity will not last long. What the poet sees is truly "for once, then, something." In the moments before obliteration he sees something with a positive existence, something he can put a name to—a field. He knows it is a field because, for the moment, positive signs of its identity remain: the "few weeds and stubble showing last." It is important to understand, then, that this is a cultivated field and not a natural clearing in the forest; it is nature given purpose and identity by man. Like the snow and the night, the weeds and stubble set up crosscurrents of meaning. The stubble is more clearly the hint of man's presence, the aftermath, quite literally, of man's contact with the land, while the weeds—which can exist only in (and therefore define) a cultivated area—remind us of nature's persistent reclamation of the artificial. What the snow smothers, in addition to everything else, is the vital conflict which the juxtaposition of "weeds and stubble" suggests.

II

As the snow piles on, obliterating all distinction, the field becomes—as the first line three times tells us—an inanimate, dead thing, unmarked by, and unreflective of, the care of man, the very thing which gave it its positive identity as a field. Remove the signs of man's involvement, and it straightway ceases to be "for once, then, something" and can only be identified negatively: it is the nothingness at the center of the encircling trees; it is the nothingness which can only be known by the positiveness which surrounds it and which can only be named in the indefiniteness of a pronoun. This annihilation is figured as death, the ultimate weight of which in cosmic fashion smothers all life, leaving the poet alone in a dead universe, touched, himself, by the death that smothers.

Confronted with the deadness, the spiritlessness, of the external world, the poet notes that he, too, is "absent-spirited"; he, too, is "included" in the loneliness, which is to say the separateness, of the universe of material objects. The paradox here is to be included in separateness, and one arrives at a perception of that paradox by recognizing the plurality of material existence and understanding one's own place in the universal array of physical facts—that is, in nature. This sense is akin to if not identical with Emerson's discovery, made "too late to be helped . . . , that we exist." For Emerson, however, we exist in positive relation to higher values; the essence of our meaning consists not in separateness but in unity. For Frost (thus far in the poem) the persona exists negatively, just as the field may be said to exist negatively. More specifically, the field (no longer a field, properly speaking) is known as the emptiness which disturbs the continuity of the woods; similarly, the poet-observer is defined by his absent-spiritedness and thus by his isolation. The analogy between the condition of nature and the condition of personal psychology is a romantic concept and one perfectly in accord with the ideas of Emerson or Wordsworth. In "Desert Places," however, the implications of the analogy are necessarily and entirely reversed since what is analogous in the persona and the field is the quality of discontinuity. For Wordsworth, and for many subsequent romantic writers including Emerson, the analogy between states of mind or dispositions of the spirit and the sympathetic universe was uplifting because it implied, or rather presupposed, an active positive alliance, a radical continuity, through God, between man and nature. Nature lives and spiritually supports us, even though it is composed in large measure of inanimate objects, because we live and God has allowed us to invest it with our lives. Wordsworth expressed this reciprocal relation when he said, "That from thyself it comes, that thou must give / Else never canst receive" (The Prelude, XII, 276-77). Frost appears, in the first three stanzas, to have reversed these implications. The analogy between man and nature appears operative, but the reciprocal relation is negative rather than positive; pluralistic rather than monistic; fragmented in its stress on aloneness rather than unified; deadly rather than life-supporting.

III

The third stanza appears at first the weakest on several counts. The purpose it serves seems primarily mechanical. It is necessary to shift the focus from the poet himself back to the scene before him in preparation for the final statement in the last stanza. The first two lines, as Reuben Brower has pointed out, achieve a "Poe-like melancholy," though perhaps by equally Poe-like mechanisms—the use of the archaic "ere" and the mournful reiteration of the word "lonely." A further weakness of these lines might consist in the inadequacy of the physical phenomenon which prompts them. Presumably the quondam field will become lonelier or less expressive than earlier because the snow is now deep enough to hide not only the "weeds and stubble showing last," but also the very contours of the land. Since the annihilation of the identity of the field was earlier accomplished when all signs of its use, its pragmatic definition, were covered, this added touch may strike the reader as gratuitous or insignificant by comparison.

The stanza does, of course, accomplish an intensification of mood, though again almost in spite of itself. The gentle hint of "ere it will be less" must be rejected if these lines are to be read as a genuine concentration of despair. The implied rebirth in the necessary melting of the snow and the reemergence of the field as a real thing is an unassimilated lump of hope, working for the moment in stubborn defiance of the tone and meaning of the poem as it stands at this point.

More subtly in defiance of the tone and meaning is the paradoxical assertion that the "blanker whiteness" has "nothing to express"—a proposition which the very existence of the poem appears to jeopardize. "Nothing" actually becomes "for once, then, something" in a context which is consistently negative. The intensity of nothingness—that is, the intensity which is insisted on in the third stanza—begins to lend to that nothingness an almost palpable reality. It is, after all, that quantity which had defined the field and defined the poet; and because nothingness is thus the landmark by which realities are known, it becomes a real, and in a sense a positive, quality. It is truly a case of nothing having escaped Frost's observation; he is like the listener in Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man" "who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." Frost evokes a similar awareness in "Neither Out Far nor In Deep" by what Trilling has called "the energy with which emptiness is perceived." That Frost could work such a paradox on us is only to say that he makes emptiness real for us as readers of the poem.

IV

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces 

Between stars—on stars where no human race is. 

I have it in me so much nearer home 

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The protestation of the first line appears to Reuben Brower "a bit flamboyant." "The scary place," Brower writes, "is thrust off 'there' by the emerging man of wit, by the mind that won't give way to 'absent-spiritedness.' But the gesture . . . opens a worse form of terror by bringing fear where the poet lives most alone." This reading depends on the assumption that the last stanza is essentially disjointed; that something has occurred between lines two and three that leads the poet to reconsider the confident defiance he has just, perhaps too heroically, expressed. In other words, in explaining the sense of the last stanza Brower finds an implicit "but" before the third line. To be sure, the poem has proceeded by crosscurrents to such an extent that it would be easy to see another one here, but in this instance the relationship between ideas seems to be causal rather than antagonistic—a transition which is perhaps better expressed by "because": They cannot scare me with their empty spaces because I have it in me to scare myself with my own desert places.

The other assumption implicit in Brower's reading is that the recognition of private deserts in one's own mind involves "a worse form of terror" than the vision of a dead universe. This assumption also needs to be examined, but first it is necessary to determine who "they" are in the opening line of the stanza and why they cannot scare the poet.

Brooks and Warren have suggested that "they" are astronomers, and, insofar as astronomers adopt an inorganic, physical, and scientific viewpoint and speak for a standard, accepted view of the universe, the suggestion is not amiss. But if the intrusion into the poem of prosaic astronomers seems unduly reductive of Frost's intended ambiguity, it might be more appropriate to take "they" to mean nature itself, pluralistically figured, since nature has been felt throughout the poem as a collection of material objects.

In "Desert Places," then, Frost is commenting on one of the most basic romantic assumptions about the universe—that it is essentially responsive to man, that we are its vital force, its reason for being. . . . What Frost realizes at the beginning of the last stanza is that nature's empty spaces are truly empty—not only of matter, but of meaning and that it is only meaning that can scare. The tune is not in the tree, and the lesson of emptiness is not between stars.

Here, in the last stanza, the major paradox of the poem is resolved. The third stanza asserts that the "blanker whiteness" had "nothing to express," though the deadly heavy pall of nothingness was itself a very considerable thing for the "blanker whiteness" to have expressed; and were it not for that very effective expression‎, the poem would have had no subject. Realizing now, in the fourth stanza, that the idea of nothingness, of emptiness or aloneness, is generated from within the mind outward and not placed in the mind from exterior nature, obviously the "blanker whiteness" truly does not and can not express, but is a mere canvas on which the observer builds out his own inherent conceptions. The tune is not in the tree; the tune of nothingness is not in the snow. Thus what seemed paradoxical in the third stanza is, when seen from the vantage of the fourth, a simple statement of fact. The "blanker whiteness" has "nothing to express"; it has, literally, no meaning.

If meaning does not inhere in nature, it exists only in the mind, just as Emily Dickinson affirmed. Frost agrees with entire explicitness: "I have it in me," he says, contrasting the substantiveness of the "it" with the "nothing" that the snow has to express. "I am," in other words, "the repository of meaning." This implied assertion, in turn, gives final development to a major theme of the poem—that of location. The field has been transformed from a positively defined entity into a thing which exists only in relation to exterior fixities, by the agency of the snow. The snow, in addition to symbolizing death, symbolizes an allied concept—doubt, that quality which undermines self-knowledge and self-containment and makes us look outside ourselves for points of reference. The poet is located by a quantity which appears to be exterior, the pervasive nullity of a dead universe. But when the poet-observer comes to understand that he is himself the repository of meaning, he is relocated—or, more properly, he locates himself as definer, namer, potentially as poet—and puts himself positively at the center of the universe. The experience he observes in the field—or rather the romantic misunderstanding he has of it—literally pulls him out of himself and makes him so vulnerable to the apparent deadness that he is nearly smothered in the rarified atmosphere of aloneness and homelessness. The poem restores him to himself, equips him with a sense of who and where he is, defined positively this time, in relation to nature and to the objects to which he will give meaning poetically. He is brought home: "I have it in me so much nearer home," he says. Here again we are dealing with two concepts which are related as cause and effect. He can locate "home" because, for the first time in the poem, he can see that there is something in him which does not exist elsewhere, and that "something" is the potential to create meaning.

Perhaps the modernity of "Desert Places" is most clearly seen in its acceptance of a universe without inherent prior meaning. There is, in the last stanza, a note almost of relief at the realization that one is not tied to a dead universe; that is, to a universe whose overarching principle is death and separateness. Rather he finds a universe without overarching principles, without prior meaning—a universe which he, as a poet, can fill up and fill out with meaning from his own life. For Frost this insight and the prospect it affords represent a tremendous freedom."They cannot scare me," seen in this light, is simply another way of saying "the universe cannot impose upon me."

For Frost, meaning is a thing people use to bridge separateness and to bring order out of real, not apparent, chaos . . . The analogy which exists between man and nature was not, for Frost, established by God, but is continually being created by man's own imagination: each time one draws an analogy between man and nature, one does so by an act of the will, not in accordance with the scheme of the universe but in defiance of its essential schemelessness. . . . What led the poet-observer into despair at the beginning of the poem was his Wordsworthian assumption that the analogy does exist a priori; by the end of the poem the mistake is discovered.

from "A Study of Frost's 'Desert Places.'" Frost: Centennial Essays. Copyright © 1973 by University Press of Mississippi.

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“Desert Places” (1936)

“Desert Places,” “Design,” and “Departmental,”
three of Frost’s most important poems, were all collected
in A Further Range, and all of them use what
seems a simple natural occurrence as material for
philosophical reflection. In “Design” it is the spider
and moth that are brought “thither in the night,”
in “Departmental” it is the death of the selfless forager
ant Jerry, and in “Desert Places” it is the “snow
falling and night falling fast, oh, fast” that halt the
speaker and inspire contemplation. Also, both
“Design,” and “Desert Places” are collected in a
section of the book titled “Taken Singly.” Among
the poems included in this section are “A Leaf-
Treader” and “Afterflakes,” which have much in
common with the above-mentioned poems.

Frost once told his friend and fellow poet Robert
Penn Warren that he wrote “Desert Places” straight
through from beginning to end. Nature, death, the
possibility of immortality, and, most of all, the inevitability
of loss are what propel this poem. Perhaps
the highly personal nature of these themes is what
allowed Frost to create the poem almost without
effort. Jay Parini asserts that “those deserts were
there, in his life and mind, and every poem was an
attempt to rescue some clarity, to find oases of language
in deserts of thought and feeling” (444).

The first stanza presents an image of nature
and of death: The snow is about to bury the
remaining “weeds and stubble” in a field the
speaker happens to be passing by. As in nearly all
of Frost’s poems, this observation of a natural
occurrence is cause for reflection on the human
condition. Frost once said in an interview, “I guess
I’m not a nature poet, I have only written two
poems without a human being in them,” and as
always, it is the human being in nature that makes
this winter scene significant. In “Desert Places,”
as in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”
wherein the speaker has also stopped on a dark
evening “[t]o watch the woods fill up with snow,”
the human being in nature is seeking a way of
“going past” the winter of life that the snow symbolizes,
perhaps because he too has “miles to go”
before he sleeps. This desire to go past is also
much like the desire of the “swinger of birches” to
climb “toward heaven.”

After the first stanza depicts the scene, the three
remaining stanzas contemplate what this winter
scene represents for the speaker: an immense loneliness.
The loneliness the snow brings is all-embracing.
It does not exempt the land, the animals “smothered
in their lairs,” or the “absent-spirited” speaker. The
speaker is not immune because he is absent-spirited,
and his lack of spirit causes him not to “count.” He is
lumped in with the rest of nature, rather than distinguished
because of his humanity, because his “spirit”
goes unnoticed. This echoes “Afterflakes,” in which
the speaker, while contemplating a “teeming snowfall,”
imagines that if he “shed[s] such darkness”
then “the reason was in [him].”

It is the ultimate loneliness—the loneliness of a
man that comes to the fore. And in particular, it is
the loneliness of a man who has no spirit. The suggestion
is that the man is faithless because he lacks
faith in a superior being, though it could also be
argued that it is because he lacks belief in himself.
Because he is faithless, he is included “unawares,”
and the question becomes, Who is unaware, the
speaker or the force that “includes”? The attribute
that is to distinguish the speaker from the other animals
is his faith and perhaps his soul. And if that is
hard to make out, hard to find, either by him or by
the force that brings on night and darkness, then he

too will be “smothered” by the snow, just as other
unaware animals are.

The speaker then informs his readers that the
loneliness the snow brings is less lonely than the
loneliness of death, as snow is only a temporary
death. It is seasonal and will eventually pass, much
as the speaker hoped to “pass” himself at the start
of the poem, perhaps to move on to spring, again
much like the speaker in “Birches,” who wants to
“begin over.” But the speaker here knows that he
cannot go past as he had hoped and that it “will be
more lonely ere it will be less.” To him the ultimate
loneliness is death. This belief reinforces his lack of
faith in the transcendent, since if one embraces
Christian ideas of immortality, death should bring
comfort and peace. But this speaker does not
believe that death will eliminate his loneliness;
rather, it will overwhelm.

The fear that nature brings with its weather is
insignificant compared with the fear that the
speaker feels is part of the human condition. The
worst Frost can imagine is not death, but death in
life—the triumph of the blank inexpressible “with
no expression‎, nothing to express.” Nothing outside
him can evoke such strong emotions as the
knowledge of his own absences. When he peers up
at the stars, he becomes only more fully aware of
his smallness—that “between stars” and “on stars”
“no human race is.”

The poem is a contemplation on the impersonal
nature of the world, but in several ways it also displays
a willfully malevolent natural force. If what
includes the speaker “unawares” is a supernatural
being, the presence of that being raises the question
Frost raises in “Design”: “What but design of
darkness to appall?— / If design govern in a thing
so small.” Surely a creator who will “smother”
unaware animals and human beings in their lairs
for being “absent-spirited” is neither benign nor
even involved. He is to be feared. There seem to be
only two choices: a designer who appalls or no
designer at all.

Many critics have imagined that the loneliness
described is not simply a revelation about the
human condition but rather a contemplation of
what utter and absolute loneliness an absence of
faith in a transcendent being can engender in
humans. But the loneliness that Frost describes in
life and in death would be overwhelming not only
for the faithless but also for those whose faith is in a
being whose darkness appalls. And the human condition
is a lonely one, with or without faith, as the
speaker is fully aware, since he has it in him “so
much nearer home / To scare [himself] with [his]
own desert places.” This is not the only night the
poet “scares” himself. Night often brings on similar
fears, as in “Acquainted with the Night” and “An
Old Man’s Winter Night.”

Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren make
a point of Frost’s use of the colloquial, childlike,
and somewhat understated “scare,” noting that
scaring is what the telling of ghost stories does to
children. They hold that “by use of the word in the
poem the man is made to imply that he is not a
child to be so easily affected” (106). By not using a
word such as terrify or horrify, Frost insinuates,
according to Brooks and Warren, that the speaker
has it within himself to overcome his fears, as “even
in his loneliness of spirit he can still find strength
enough in himself ” (106). In Frost, human cunning
is often pitted against nature’s constant challenges
and occasional malevolence, but human beings
mostly overcome. However, in “Bonfire,” another
of the only 12 poems in which Frost uses a form of
the word “scare,” the speaker’s ghost story frightens
the narrator as much as it does the children. See
NATURE and STARS.

FURTHER READING
Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding
Poetry. 3rd ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1960, 104–107.
Brower, Reuben A. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations
of Intention. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1963, 108–110.
Cook, Reginald. The Dimensions of Robert Frost. New
York: Rinehart, 1958, 186–187.
———. Robert Frost: A Living Voice. Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, 1974.
Doyle, John Robert, Jr. The Poetry of Robert Frost: An
Analysis. New York: Hafner Press, 1962, 159–166.
Hass, Robert. Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict
with Science. Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 2002. 98–100.

Heaney, Seamus. “Above the Brim.” In Robert Frost,
Modern Critical Views, edited by Harold Bloom,
201–218. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2003.
McInery, Stephen. “ ‘Little Forms’: Four Poems and a
Developing Theme of Robert Frost,” Critical Review
40 (2000): 59–74.
Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England
Renaissance. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1988. 109–111.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999,
285–286.
Stone, Edward. “ ‘Other ‘Desert Places’: Frost and
Hawthorne.” In Frost Centennial Essays, edited by
Jac Tharpe, et al., 275–287. Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1974.
Von Frank, Albert J. “ ‘Nothing That Is’: A Study of
Frost’s ‘Desert Places,’ ” In Frost: Centennial Essays,
edited by Jac Tharpe, et al., 121–132. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1974.

Critical Companion to Robert Frost A Literary Reference to His Life And Work(2007)  - Deirdre Fagan +

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#

Nonetheless, there was a dark side to Frost—hardly anyone who knew him has ever denied as much; in fact, in “Desert Places” Frost himself would write: “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.” But Frost was able to make use of these dark places, too, dipping into them—as in “Spring Pools”—“to bring dark foliage on.”

#

After the New Year, the Frosts returned to their home in Amherst. Frost plunged into teaching, then in April set off for the usual round of readings and lectures. On May 31, 1933, Elinor wrote to Richard Thornton:

 We are still in Amherst. We have lingered here because of Robert’s health. Two days after he was in New York, he came down with a bad cold. It was a queer cold, with a temperature, and has been followed by a prolonged period of temperature and prostration. He has very little appetite, and is intensely nervous. The doctor is watching him, with tuberculosis in mind, and advises absolute quiet for an indefinite period, that is, an avoidance of whatever might be a physical or nervous strain. He stays in bed until dinner time, and then dresses and wanders around the house, and if it is sunny, sits a little while outdoors. 17

 One is amazed by the endless succession of illnesses recorded by Elinor, month after month. These bouts of flu may have been related to the depression that Frost was always, on some level, fending off. Elinor often notes in her letters that “Robert has taken to his bed,” with or without obvious cause. He went through prolonged periods when he could not teach, or travel, or write.

 Frost barely made it through the wedding in Montana, which took place in June, and spent much of the summer ailing. He found himself short of breath, easily tired, and prone to fevers and racking coughs. The suspicion arose that he might have contracted tuberculosis, an old fear that seems never to have left him. His doctor in South Shaftsbury suggested that he think about spending the winters in a warm climate, such as Florida. (In later years, Frost would in fact follow this advice, eventually buying a place in South Miami.) The current illness was exacerbated by his annual bout with hay fever. All previously arranged readings and lectures were canceled in the late summer and early fall of 1933.

One of the few good things to come out of this period was the poem “Desert Places,” which Frost claimed (as usual) to have written straight through from beginning to end “without fumbling a sentence.” 18 The poem opens with a breathless moment of realization:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past.
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

 Frost notes that the “animals are smothered in their lairs,” a striking image of claustrophobic despair. Then he goes on, shockingly:

 I am too absent-spirited to count;
 The loneliness includes me unawares.

 It would be hard to overpraise the stark brilliance of the last line above, with its suggestion of the mingling of interior and exterior realities. The snow-covered landscape, so muffled and blank, mirrors an inner feeling of isolation and spiritual poverty:

 And lonely as it is that loneliness
 Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
 A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
 With no expression‎, nothing to express.

 For equal severity, one would have to turn to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s so-called Terrible Sonnets, especially the one that opens: “No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief, / More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.” Like Hopkins, Frost would sink into a deep melancholy, then cast his thoughts upon the landscape around him, finding in that external reality a corresponding vision of bleakness.

 The poet in “Desert Places” looks up at the stars and says: “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars,” alluding to Pascal, who spoke of the “infinite silent spaces between the stars.” In the chilling final couplet, Frost concludes: “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”

from "Robert Frost, a Life"

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