38 pages • 1 hour read
Robert FrostA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
The poem uses its carefully-patterned, very conventional form ironically, reflecting Frost’s position as part of both the 19th and 20th centuries.
Although the poem’s argument is tricky and relies on a distinctly modern sense of subtle irony, the poem itself reflects Frost’s faith in the integrity of inherited poetic form. The poem consists of four tidy, carefully structured quintains, that is stanzas with five lines. The rhyme scheme is reassuringly there, undergirding the work. The rhyming does not insist on itself—ABAAB—does not take over the poem in some distracting singsong-y way. But it is there.
The poem’s tight form lends itself, ironically, to the conversational tone of the poem. The poem does not read like a tightly structured poem because the rhyming scheme is quieter, underscoring the tightly metered, tightly rhymed poem. It reads more like a prose narrative. The form invites rather than intimidates, relaxing into an immediacy as if asking the reader to share that pivotal moment in the woods. Each formed stanza reflects the tidy steps of the hiker’s decision-making process, moving from the presentation of the choice (Stanza 1) to the consideration of the paths (Stanza 2) to the choice (Stanza 3) and closing with the implications of the choice (Stanza 4).
By Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost
After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost
A Time To Talk
Robert Frost
Birches
Robert Frost
Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
October
Robert Frost
Once by the Pacific
Robert Frost
Out, Out—
Robert Frost
Putting in the Seed
Robert Frost
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
The Death of the Hired Man
Robert Frost
The Gift Outright
Robert Frost
West-Running Brook
Robert Frost