On John Ciardi's "The Way to the Poem"

         Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening” is one of the great masterpieces of American poetry.  It is known for its ambiguity that has produced a vast number of different interpretations.  The American critic, John Ciardi, tried his hand at interpreting the poem, and at the same time, tried to determine where the meaning of it comes from.  Ciardi’s essay is very modern and was very much ahead of its time.

John Ciardi wrote his controversial essay, “The Way to the Poem” in 1958 for the respected literary magazine, The Saturday Review.  During this time period, New Criticism was the most highly practiced form of literary theory.  New Critics believe that every poem, novel, or any other writing is a work completely to itself, it’s text different and unique from all other works.  New Criticism stresses that every work means exactly what it says; there are no in-depth meanings to any literature.  Practicing New Criticism involves reading a work very closely, and identifying the parts of it that make it unique.  In the close reading, New Critics look for complexities such as paradoxes, ironies, and ambiguities that may cause people to have multiple interpretations.  Then, they find the unifying idea that resolves all of the complexities, and find the details that support their findings.  In taking all of these steps, New Critics believe that every reader will come to the same conclusion about any given text.  The reaction that the New Critics had to “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” was one of a nice poem.  They felt that it was about a man taking a ride through the woods and stops to watch the snowfall.  He gets so caught up in the beauty of the scene that he looses track of time.  Finally, after realizing that it is getting dark and that he has things to do, he goes home.  Ciardi’s essay was controversial because his interpretation of the poem is completely different than that of the New Critical version.  Ciardi used several techniques, such as Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, and Structuralism, which were unconventional at the time, to come to a conclusion about the poem’s meaning.  All of these practices are modern forms of criticism that hadn’t surfaced during the time that the essay was written.  The ideas were alive in society, but they didn’t have enough of a following to be considered as a formal criticism.

         Ciardi used Deconstruction in his essay.  Deconstruction is a form of literary theory that states that there are no definite meanings in literature.  If a person feels that he/she has come to the correct interpretation of any particular poem, then he/she has probably found the opposite of what the poem is really about.  Deconstructionists find phrases in texts that are ambiguous.  These undetermined meanings are said to be “in play.”  Play is the endless possibilities of what something could mean.  Ciardi identifies a couple of things in the poem as being in play.  For instance, “Why does the man not say what errand he is on?  What is the force of leaving the errand generalized?” (149). Ciardi also questions the end of the poem when the third line of stanza four is repeated.  “ The second time he says it, however,” says Ciardi, “miles to go” and “sleep” are suddenly transformed into symbols.  What are those “something-else’s the symbols stand for?” (152). Both of these quotes show that Ciardi is unsure of the meaning of the two things that were mentioned.  When giving his interpretation of them, Ciardi is careful to use phrases like, “ the center point of that second “miles to go” is probably approximately in the neighborhood of being close to the meaning, perhaps, “the road of life”; and the second “before I sleep” is maybe that close to meaning, “before I take my final rest” (153).  Using words such as “perhaps” and “maybe” signify that he doesn’t know for sure what the phrase means. 

   Deconstructionists also look for words in a text that, when compared with their opposites, give a generalization about the meaning of them.   The compared words are called binary oppositions.   Deconstructionaists determine which one is preferred over the other.  Even though he never mentions it in his essay, Ciardi contrasts the binary opposition of dark/light.   Symbolism of these two words is taken from the Biblical use of them.  Light is associated with Christ, Heaven, and life, whereas Satan, Hell, and death are characterized by the dark. Ciardi recognizes this characterization of “darkness as death” when he says, “ can one fail to sense by now that dark and snowfall represent a death wish?” (151). In this poem, Ciardi believes that the man prefers the darkness over the light. But how does this make the poem a death wish?  To understand this, one must understand Ciardi’s psychoanalytical interpretation of the poem.

Ciardi said, “Frost could not have known he was going to write those lines until he wrote them” (154). Frost himself said that they just “felt right” (153).  With these things being said, Ciardi practiced Psychoanalysis.  Psychoanalysis is the act of interpreting one’s dreams, words, actions, and writings by studying that person’s unconscious mind.  If the poem did in fact “just come” (156) to him, then there must have been something in his unconscious self that brought it to him.  This “something” is called a repressed feeling.  Repression happens when the conscious mind deems a desire as unacceptable, and places it into the unconscious.  Ciardi believes that the repressed desire of Frost is suicide.  He backs his theory up by identifying symbols in the text.  Symbols are words used in place of an actual idea that if actually told, would reveal a forbidden desire in the author.  Ciardi says, “Can one fail to sense by now that the dark and the snowfall symbolize a death wish…” (151).  The dark symbol has already been established as being associated with death.  Snowfall symbolizes the fall of man into his final slumber.  Both of these symbols help to shape Ciardi’s “death wish” theory.

 Ciardi offers answers to questions that he said were left in play by Frost.  The first question, “why does the man not say what errand he is on?” is answered “the more aptly to suggest any errand in life and, therefore, life itself ” (150). The other question, “why does he say so much about knowing the absent owner of the woods and where he lives?” is answered, “ the force he represents is the village of mankind from which the poet finds himself separated” (150).    Ciardi goes on to say, “the fact that the man’s relation (with the woods) begins with his separation from mankind” (150).  So the unconscious feeling that Frost is displaying in these lines is his want to leave mankind. 

Ciardi also introduces the theory that this poem is actually a struggle between the conscious and the unconscious of Frost’s mind, a collection of thoughts.  The horse in stanzas one and two represent what Ciardi calls a “foil” (151).  “A foil is a character who plays against another character,” says Ciardi (151).  In stanza two, the horse acts as the conscious voice of the man in the poem, wondering why he is stopping in the middle of nowhere in the cold, snowy, weather.  The “death wish” of the unconscious is what is actually keeping the man in the woods.  With this being said, the horse has also become a symbol of the sensible, conscious mind.

Ciardi misses the symbolism of the title, “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  With the psychoanalytic response, the word “Stopping” would represent a stopping of one’s life.  In this case, the implication of death would be established before the poem begins.

Ciardi says that stanza four is the final decision that the man makes.  Even though “his mood lingers over the thought of that lovely dark-and-deep,” Ciardi says that the man moved on (152).  His social obligations, as symbolized by his “promises to keep,” persuade him to go on to his destination.  After all, he has a long way to travel, “and miles to go before I sleep (1st time)” (Frost 147).

Ciardi wasn’t as concerned with the actual interpretation of the poem as he was with how one comes to it.  This is the same feeling that Structuralists have.  Structuralism involves examining a literary work’s grammatical usage to see how a person gets an interpretation.  Ciardi states that this is what he wants to find out when he says, “What happens in it? (the Frost poem)-which is to say, not what does it mean, but how does it mean?” (148).  In looking for an answer, Ciardi practices several of the Structuralism techniques.

Structuralists feel that the best way for one to understand a text’s meaning is to read and understand other texts.  They feel that in understanding the language and it’s literary conventions, one can come to a valid interpretation of any work.  Ciardi brings this technique into his essay in the very beginning with his criticism of the school system.  He says that the school system has a list of poems that students are required to read before they graduate. This is good in that the students are exposed to different forms of poetry; however, they are not made to come to any conclusion about what the poem means.  Ciardi believes that readers of any age should first understand poem before moving on to another.  He states this himself when he says, “Poetry, finally, is one poem at a time.  To read any one poem carefully is the ideal preparation for reading another.  Only a poem can illustrate how a poem works” (148).  Ciardi uses this procedure with his interpretation of the Frost poem when he compares it to Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Longfellow’s “Village Blacksmith,” and Holme’s “Chambered Nautilus” (148).  All of these poems are built on the same poetic formula that Frost’s poem is.  Ciardi uses this technique again to explain Frost’s motive for writing a simple language to a simple narrative when he quote’s Frost’s line from, “The Mowing:”  “Anything more than the truth would have seemed to week” (Frost 150).

Ciardi also looks at the structure to assist him in finding a meaning.  In fact, he says, “Poetry can not be discussed meaningfully unless one can assume that everything in the poem-every last comma and variant spelling-is in it by the poet’s specific act of choice” (149-150).  With this in mind, the concept of signifier/signified comes in to play.  Ferdinand de Sausseure is associated with this concept.  He said that all words are signifiers.  When produced, these words signify something in the reader’s mind that gives him/her a feeling of what a poem is about.  The signified is relative to each person.  The signifiers that Ciardi identifies are dark, snowfall, and horse.  All of these signified an unconscious desire to commit suicide, to Ciardi.  This is one of the reasons for the controversy from the New Critics.  To them, the words in the poem signified nice things.

The end of the poem stresses Frost’s masterful use of the English language.  Ciardi says that rhyming in English is a very difficult thing to do.  There are few words that rhyme with each other.  In other languages, such as Italian, French, and Spanish, there are an endless number of words that rhyme.  In these languages, a poet has no trouble finding the right words to rhyme that will convey the message that he wants to give in the proper way.  In English, a poet may have the perfect word to use that will describe what he wants to say.  However, the word may have few to none words that will rhyme with it.  Even if the word does fit the rhyme, it may produce multiple responses that the author didn’t intend.  Ciardi believes that Frost played a game.  Most poems are written with four line stanzas, having the second and third lines’ endings rhyme with each other. Frost went beyond this.  He stayed with the four-line stanzas, but he rhymed the endings of the first, second, and fourth lines.  In the last stanza, Frost began rhyming the first, second, and third lines, but became stuck because no word that rhymed with “sleep” would fit into the last stanza.  Therefore, he repeated his third stanza as the fourth.  This was very unconventional of poetry, but was praised by Ciardi.  He said, “The miracle is that it worked.  Despite the enormous freight of rhyme, the poem not only came out as a neat pattern, but also managed to do so with no sense of strain.  Every word and every rhyme falls into place as naturally and as inevitably as if there were no rhyme restricting the poet’s choices” (155).

There are a couple of things in the essay that causes a contradiction of Ciardi’s interpretation.  As a Structuralist, Ciardi said that everything that is put into a poem is by the author’s choice.  In other words, he knows exactly what he is writing, and what he means to say.  However, as a psychoanalyst, he stated that Frost could not have known why he wrote the lines, nor could he have known what he was thinking.  He is contradicting himself in saying that Frost knows why he wrote the poem, but he really doesn’t know why.  How can a man know and not know at the same time?  This is a paradox that the New Critics could have used to pick the essay apart.

As a Psychoanalyst, Ciardi believes the poem to be a thought process of a man in the woods.  However, in looking at the syntax of the first line of the poem, we can see how a Structuralist could differ with him.  The line reads, “Whose woods these are, I think I know” (147).  This seems to be more of a line from a narrative rather than a thought.  This is so in that it gives the feeling that someone has asked the man who owns the land.  He replies with a question, “Whose woods these are?”  This is a common way to reply to someone with the question previously asked.  Then he responds with a general comment about his knowledge, “I think I know.”  With this being said, the poem seems to be heading in the direction of a story rather than a thought.  However, when someone asks the question to another person, it would probably be more along the line of, “Whose woods are these?”  The same would apply if someone asked himself the same question.  Therefore, if it were a thought process, then the man would most likely have used, “Whose woods are these,” and not what is actually written.

It’s true that this essay is very modern and was beyond its time when it first appeared to the public.  However, just because its modern doesn’t mean that all modern critics readily accept it.  In taking a feminist point of view to the essay, I found one major problem with it.  In Ciardi’s Psychoanalytic interpretation, he studies Frost’s unconscious mind by examining the words that he wrote.  In doing so, he naturally assumes that the character in the story is a male.  However, there is nothing in the text to support a male character assumption.  By switching the character’s role from male to female, Ciardi’s interpretation is completely destroyed.  Now, Frost is taken out of the picture because he is obviously not a female, and his interpretation goes with him because there is no longer anyone there to have a repressed feeling.

To a Feminist, “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening” could represent a woman’s refusal to give up her life to get married.  There is one major signifier in the poem, the word “woods.”  Woods signifies marriage.  In the first two lines, the female asks, “Whose woods these are, I think I know.  His house is in the village though” (147).  In asking “whose” marriage this is, and then responding with “his,” we can see that she feels the marriage is more beneficial to the male than the female; the male “owns” the marriage.  Next, it has to be understood that “snow” represents good things.  Everyone loves snow.  Skiers get excited when there is fresh snow on the ground, children love to get out of school because of it, and every Christmas time is always associated with snow.  When she says, “he will not see me stopping her to watch his woods fill up with snow,” she is really saying that she will not give in to a marriage that will only produce good things for him (147).  Of course we can understand her feelings.  In a traditional marriage, the man gets a wife to cook, clean, do laundry, take care of the kids, etc.  However, there is never much mentioned about what the wife gets out of it.

In the second stanza, the man becomes the horse.  “My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near,” is the mindset of the man (147).  He doesn’t understand why the female doesn’t want to marry him.  She then gives a reason.  One must remember that woods represents male-dominated marriages.  In this particular line, the word is used in a singular voice, “wood,” to show that she is speaking of one particular marriage, hers.  The “frozen lake” is interpreted as a wife who is frozen to the marriage, in this case, again her.  “Between” indicates an event that comes between the marriage and her being “frozen.”  This event is the actual wedding day.  She feels that her wedding day would be the biggest mistake of her life by calling it “the darkest day of the year” (147).

Stanza three again opens with the male’s voice.  He is now actually pleading with her for the reason of her rejection of the marriage.  He wonders if it is some mistake that he made, or one that she may have made about him.  However, she is only hearing the sounds “of easy wind and downy flake” (147).  Wind is always associated with trees.  We always hear of the wind blowing through the trees.  In turn, trees are associated with woods.  Also, keep in mind that snow is symbolic of good things.  “Flake” is a single piece of snow.  Therefore, “easy wind” gives the impression of the ease of his marriage.  “Downy flake” is each individual good thing that is continuously falling on him.

Finally, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep,” brings out the innate female desire (which males also have), to get married and settle down (147).  However, she has “promises to keep” to herself.  These are the goals that she had set for her life long before she ever met the man.   The first “And miles to go before I sleep” shows us that she has a lot of plans to fulfill before she can settle down (147).  She can’t get married because marriage would “freeze” her and not allow her to accomplish her goals.  The repeated verse of  “And miles to go before I sleep” let’s us know that she is aware that she has plenty of time left in her life.  Not only can she fulfil her dreams for herself, but she may also, perhaps, get married sometime later in life.

With the Feminist view, New Critical criticism, and contradictions within the essay, we can clearly see that “The Way to the Poem” is indeed an essay of much deliberation.  Ciardi made valid points and supported them well, but at the same time, left himself open for criticism.  However, even if one doesn’t agree with everything that Ciardi says, he/she has to agree that the essay is truly remarkable in that it uses so many techniques that were not relevant to the time period in which it was written.  The essay, as well as Ciardi, was just ahead of their time.

 

Works Cited

Ciardi, John. "The Way to the Poem." John Ciardi: Dialogue with an

Audience. J.B. Lippincott Co. Philadelphia & New York,

1958. 148-160

Frost, Robert. "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening."

John Ciardi: Dialogue with an Audience.

J.B. Lippincott Co. Philadelphia & New York,

1958. 147