Real Poetry Part 2: The Antidote to the Ersatz and Confused

Its structure compounds its meaning and images. Rhythmically, it has the wonderful four-beat iambic meter, which mirrors the smooth movement on such a dark night. The lines are end-stopped, just like the little horse who stops and thinks it “queer.” In other words, each line makes sense without necessarily running into the next line. Indeed, the first line itself is one whole sentence.
Though simple, the first sentence’s syntax is reversed. The normal sentence structure would be: “I think I know whose woods these are,” but that blandness would create no mystery. Beginning with the word “whose” immediately poses a question in readers’ minds.
The virtually unobtrusive interlocking triple rhyme scheme ends in a finality of five rhymes: sweep, deep, keep, sleep, and sleep (an identical rhyme). Usually when there’s too much rhyming, the effect is banal or clichéd, but here, the effect is profoundly satisfying and has a a feeling of inevitability. It’s like the poem is saying, in a world of darkness, cold, and even chaos, there is order, there is rhyme. Of course, one has to stop the horse to see it and hear it.
Focusing on the diction a moment: Readers see that nearly 70 percent of the words are monosyllabic. The rest, except one, are bisyllabic (evening I would read “eve-ning,” though it could be “eve-en-ing”). That leaves one word, coming right near the end, “promises,” that is genuinely trisyllabic.
What to make of this? Monosyllabic words create a steady, almost meditative cadence. Each word lands like a soft footstep or a gentle snowfall. The simplicity and repetitive rhythm evoke the quiet serenity of the woods. The natural pauses in such short words leave space for reflection, reinforcing the speaker’s calm, though slightly hesitant, mood.
The bisyllabic words tend to point to elsewhere—the village, the farmhouse—slight distractions from the nowness and removed the woods.
A sense of darkness and hope pervade the poem; it does so in a way that reflects what real life is like. All of us experience darkness at least at some time in our life, and yet, too, we also know hope. Hope indeed sustains us as we continue our journey, our personal odyssey.
Although this discussion hardly does the poem justice, we do begin to see that the line “And miles to go before I sleep” is a universe away from the repetition of “Four legs good, two legs bad” that we considered in Part 1 of this article. Frost is exploring the mystery of life; the other is just political sloganeering (deliberate, of course, on George Orwell’s part). Frost invites us to feel and participate in life as it really is; the other invites us to label and hate those who are different from us.
We need real poetry in education, and, as much as possible, we need to avoid ersatz poetry. The only use of ersatz poetry is to occasionally contrast it with real poetry. If teachers can no longer discern the difference between the two, then teachers need to go back to the classics and study them.