Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

structureandstyle:

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-minded to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

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.

—Robert Frost

I loved Robert Frost in middle school, never realizing how “lovely, dark and deep” his poems were. There’s a real menacing air, a loneliness and solitude and solipsism in his poems that my middle school brain refused to process. The darkness I see as an adult seems more refreshing, more real.

This poem reminds me a lot of section 50 of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” because of how often Frost refers to “it.” Poets are not typically imprecise with their language, using “it” and “they” without purpose. In section 50 of Whitman’s poem, the “it” seems to be the thing itself he cannot name (“There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me”), and Frost seems to be using “it” similarly. Whatever “it” is—the woods have it, and the speaker of this poem does not. And that’s pretty damn lonely.

Isn’t it interesting, too, that the desert and the snow are completely opposite climates, and yet the speaker finds them both lonely? We see what we see; we bring our own world views to everything we touch.

-R