Seniors--Poetry as a Performance (read before lab assignment)

In performance poetry like "Speech Therapy," the type of poetry that jazzes up the genre, the reader is very aware of the "performance" nature of the poem. The poet himself bounces to the rhythm of the spoken word, kick starts and slides into rhymes, shouts metaphors and clashes symbols so that even the poetry novice knows that something is "happening" in the poem.

But what about the performance of a poem like "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," the sneakily subtle snowy masterpiece by Robert Frost?

What is the "performance" aspect of that poem?

Read my notes below before you advance to Poetry 180 to read, select, and analyze your own poem.

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

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening—poetry as a performance

1. What the poem means cannot be separated from how it means

2. How it means often involves "performing through difficulties it imposes upon itself"

3. Those difficulties include form (structure), rhyme, meter, symbols, poetic figures, conventions of the genre, etc.

(In Stopping by Woods …. the performance is understated—the story, language is common, not specific or descriptive; the sound is pleasant, almost hypnotic—all creating a tone that invites reader participation)

1st stanza
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.
(highlights of the performance—aaba rhyme "chain-linked" to the next stanza, iambic tetrameter, speaker (familiar with the area), the owner of the woods lives in the village—woods [repeated, too])

2nd stanza
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.

(the performance—bringing in another force [the horse], the setting description of the frozen lake/darkest evening of the year adds a sense of mystery—why is he stopping? Why is it the "darkest evening" of the year?)

3rd stanza
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 performance—this is a sound stanza—the horse's bells (ake sound) signaling his asking "if there is some mistake" vs. the sweep of easy wind and downy flake—s and w sounds (soft sounds that the narrator notices) and the first introduction of the EEP sound, the sound that will close the poem)

4th stanza
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.

((the performance—the use of simple, common, and general woods like "lovely, dark, and deep" invite reader thought, again—what is lovely about the "dark and deep" woods? The four rhyming lines create a lullaby effect with the resonance of the EEP sound—the last line repeats the third—the first time the narrator says this line to indicate a distance to getting home, the repetition implies that he says it to himself because he recognizes some deeper meaning in the words and in this poem)

Frost did not know he was going to write those last lines before he wrote them. It was a happy accident that occurred when he decided he had to eventually end the "chain-link" rhyme, and his performance, in a way that summed up both the message and performance of his poem.

Remember, "what" a poem means cannot be separated from "how" a poem means.