MICROCOSMOS POEM #9
#9
Desert Places
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh,
fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth
in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing
last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absentabsent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing
nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their
empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no
human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert
places.
R. Frost (1936)
ANALYSIS/DISCUSSION:
Besides feelings of personal
lonesomeness, there’s also a
sense of cosmic alienation, of
mankind being alone in the
universe. Do you think this
sense of isolation is restricted to
the last stanza or does it
pervade the entire poem?
“Snow” could be seen as a
reference to the higher
establishment (i.e. the
government who may seek to
suffocate the individual) and
“animals” to the lower levels of
society. Do you think this poem
is about social pressures and
the poet’s failure to conform?
If you consider "my own desert
places" to mean emptiness
within oneself, this becomes
less about loneliness and more
about something lacking in the
poet’s life. Which lines might
support this?
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Robert Frost was born in San Francisco
but moved to New England at the age of
11. He earned four Pulitzer Prizes in his
fifty plus years of writing poetry.
Try comparing and contrasting
this piece with another of
Frost’s poems – “Tree at My
Window”