从罗伯特•弗洛斯特的几首诗歌分析他的矛盾(4)
2014-07-15 02:18
导读：In this poem, nature becomes fascinating at first with the help of “easy wind and downy lake.” The woods seem to be a place that offers the speaker a momentary escape from the “promise”—his
In this poem, nature becomes fascinating at first with the help of “easy wind and downy lake.” The woods seem to be a place that offers the speaker a momentary escape from the “promise”—his responsibility and obligation in real life. The speaker’s responsibility and obligation in real life are diminished for a moment by the apparently vast domain of the woods. He begins to find solace in nature. However, “sleep” in this poem by its very nature is a common symbol of death. So, in this poem, the speaker was stopping and pondering over the woods. Should I move on or end my life over there? Which means whether to face the real life or escape the real life? One is the social responsibility that is waited to be fulfilled; the other is the death, a permanent home. The reason why the speaker, as the poet himself, was stopping by woods on a snowy evening is that he was paradoxical in his heart. Fortunately, the poet’s former promises reminded him of his responsibility in the world. So the poet feels he should not allow himself to give in to his desire to stay there decided to move on, to stop dreaming and get back to a world of responsibilities and practicality. The repetition of the last two lines indicates the poet’s sense of responsibility.
B Contradiction Between People and Nature
Frost is a lover of nature, nature is sacred, it is a holy ground, a place of refuge, and tranquillizer. When people get hurt, he can take comfort and rebirth in nature. In this poem, “the woods are lovely, dark and deep,” the world of the woods is a world that offers perfect quiet and solitude. The speaker stops by woods on this "darkest evening of the year" to watch them "fill up with snow," and lingers so long that his "little horse" shakes his harness bells "to ask if there is some mistake." The woods hold a mystical attraction for the speaker, who finds himself alone between the two opposing worlds of nature and man. Even his little horse knows that one dose not usually stop before reaching the village, especially on the “darkest evening of the year”. Nature becomes fascinating at first with the help of “easy wind and downy lake”. The woods seem to be a place which offers the speaker a momentary escape from the “promise”—his responsibility and obligation in real life. The speaker’s responsibility and obligation in real life are diminished for a moment by the vast domain of the woods. He begins to find solace in nature. However, in this comfort lies danger. Woods are also a familiar image for danger, and their darkness and depth give a sense of uncertainty. So the speaker puts in mind of the "promises" he has to keep, of the miles he still must travel. The call of social responsibility proves stronger than the attraction of the woods, which are "lovely" as well as "dark and deep". The woods is regarded as a synecdoche for nature, it seems in this poem that man must learn both to accept and to resist the pull of nature. So at the end, the speaker dismisses the mysteries which the woods offer, in order to keep the unnamed promises awaiting him in the village.
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C Contradiction Between People and Society
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is one of his famous poems. This poem expresses Frost’s attitude towards life: the ideal is beautiful, reality is heavy; but one cannot indulge in beautiful ideal and forget the reality, also cannot escape reality because of the heavy reality. At the beginning of 20th century, the human world was involved in World War I. So the life is hard at that time. In this poem, the speaker stops by woods on this “darkest evening of the year” to watch them fill up with snow.
The woods symbolize a world that offers perfect quiet and solitude. He contemplates the coldness of the snow and is tempted into giving up all relationships in the society and become a hermit. In the second stanza, he imagines what the horse is thinking. The details of “the woods and frozen lake” may be in the man’s line of vision, but they may also be his way of placing the scene on a mental map, just as “darkest evening” may place the day on a mental calendar. The fourth stanza is even more subjective in its description of the woods as “lovely, dark and deep.” All of this inward and outward movement and the poem’s oppositions make us feel that the man is being pulled in different directions and needs to make a decision. From the last stanza, He apparently decides to return to the real world and cease his dreaming. He is leaving nature and returning to society to accept social duty.
In fact, in my opinion, I think that living in such a complex society. We have to experience a lot of things, make many decisions, sometimes we don’t know the choice we ever made is right or wrong, so we need to stop and reflect on our experience, like the speaker in Frost’s poem. One of the messages of “Stopping by Woods” seems to be just that — pausing and reflecting on experience help us re-enter life with a new understanding and sense of direction.
IV.The Reasons Behind the Paradoxical View of the World of Robert Frost
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Plato deemed individual had his or her own role in the world: “Within a society, each individual has his or her own naturally established role or function, serving to maintain the stability and unity of the community as a whole. At the personal level, each desire, so long as it is governed by reason, has a role in the individual’s overall life”. The desire of Frost, as well, played a very important role in both his life and poems. He holds a paradoxical view of the world.
A. The Historical Background of Frost
The years between 1920 and 1930 were a great time in American literature. In the ten years, there appears a large number of outstanding literary works. To sum up, there are two important factors that make this happen. One is the World War I. The other is mental state at the beginning of 20th century. For the United States, after the World War I, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that Americans had gained everything for which they had fought. It appeared economic expansion. The country's economic and cultural way of life began to change, which brought urbanization in national life. But at the end of the decade, there came the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. In addition to the economic crisis, the decade was also an era of crisis of faith. Since the inception of Darwin's theory of evolution, the crisis of faith had become serious. Without faith, people would not be able to make thoughts and feelings consistent. Without faith, people lose their sense of security, resulting in depression, feelings of hopelessness.
In the literature, new and different experiences require new and different forms, such as symbolism, transcendentalism and so on, and Frost is mainly influenced by two theories which help him build his self-contradictory view of the world. One is transcendentalism, and the other is evolutionism of Darwin.
1. Influenced by Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism flourishes in the 1830s and 1940s in New England area. Transcendentalists firmly believe in self-reliance, constantly telling people to seek for spiritual perfection by living in the remote rural world, because transcendentalists believe nature plays a role of “medium” between the spiritual world and human beings. If humans get on well with nature, they can build harmonies which they long for. Frost partially and indirectly accepted Transcendentalism when he was young under the influence of his mother. From Kearns’s point of view: we can find in Frost’s poems some of Thoreau’s love of isolation, Hawthorne’s dark vision, Longfellow’s traditional craftsmanship, Dickinson’s dry humor, and Robinson’s realistic characterization. Therefore, he depicts nature sometimes in the tone of appreciation and sometimes in the tone of terror.
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2. Influenced by Darwin’s Theory
In 1859, the English naturalist Charles Darwin’s work On the Origin of Species shocked the world. On the Origin of Species is a theory of evolution, holding much creative thinking. According to Darwin, every living thing has to struggle constantly for existence, in such struggles, only the fit species who can adapt to current conditions can survive and have descendants, it is also the natural selection. Frost was deeply influenced by Darwin’s Theory. 4In Robert Faggen’s Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, it tells that Frost had begun to read Darwin as a teenager, and as a special student at Harvard, Frost had read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. No doubt, Frost has absorbed Darwin’s theory of natural selection and he has applied it to his nature depiction. In his mind, nature is indifferent, alien and hostile.
According to the two theories, we can have a conclusion: Frost knows very well that nature is powerful, indifferent and full of threat from Darwin’s theory, but he still prefers to return back to it so that he can achieve the final harmony because he believes human beings are a part of nature.
B. The Personal Life of Frost
Robert Lee. Frost was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco. Although he was a city boy, he lived a relatively peaceful life in his early childhood on the farm. With both parents as teachers, young Frost was early on exposed to the world of books and reading. He also formed a life-long love of nature and rural countryside. When he was 11 years old, he lost his father to illness, and the warm and stable environment changed. Then his mother decided to move her family to Massachusetts to be with her extended family members.
After graduating from high school in 1892, he entered Dartmouth College, but seven weeks later, he dropped out. He began to work as teacher and News staff, and write poems. He got his first break as a poet in 1894 when the New York magazine Independent published “My Butterfly”. On 19 December 1895, he got married. In 1897, he tried college again, Harvard. Unfortunately, two years later, he left in the middle because of his tuberculosis. In 1901, Frost’s grandfather died. Frost got the right of using the Derry Farm for ten years. In spite of many years’ work in the field, Frost, though a sincere lover of nature and country life, was always an inept farmer, but a voracious readers, and he kept writing poems all those days, However, Frost’s path to recognition was unfortunately quite a long one: most of his poetic works were refused by publishing houses in the United States, therefore, In 1912, he decided to sell his farm and venture everything on a literary career. He sailed to England, together with his wife, five children and a full case of manuscripts of his poems.
