Whose woods these are I think I know...

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 sounds 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.

If you do not recognize these words then your woods should be filling up with Google searches for Robert Frost and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

As a poet, Frost is way down the list of those set to quality music. Near the top we have Uncle Walt Whitman with Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony and Dona nobis pacem. Of course, Shakespeare will always be the pinnacle in English, but his plays were set more regularly than his poetry.

On the German side is Schiller and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Goethe and Gounod’s Faust, Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, Boito’s Mefistofele, Liszt’s Mephisto Waltzes.

Faust is, like, popular and stuff.

The Germans also have Wilhelm Müller and Schubert’s two great song cycles: Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. When it comes to poetry set to great music the Germans would be the clear winners if this were a competition.

Yet what about Frost? The most prominent setting of his poetry is Randall Thompson’s 1959 Frostiana, which includes the poem above. This is an ideal piece of music for our Depressed Disney-dad at Christmas etc. playlist.

Thompson’s music is straightforward in its depiction of the text, even down to the horse giving its harness bells a shake in the piano. The music is lovely and fitting and doesn’t distract us by taking us on a quest to figure out why he wrote it the way he did. In this composition the text is in the primary position.

There are an untold number of ways to internalize this poem, including suicide, but first of all it is a beautiful description of a solitary figure pausing to watch the woods filling up with snow. This pausing, even though there are miles to go and promises to keep, is what we so often find missing in our current lifestyle, and it is the one thing that music can provide for us.

It seems strange to just sit down and listen to music for two hours at a symphony concert. It’s just as strange as taking half an hour to watch the sunset or to watch the woods fill with snow. Although, how often do we go out of our way to watch a sunset or read a poem by Robert Frost, let alone Whitman, Shakespeare, or any of the German poets mentioned above?

Okay, I gotta go because Star Wars is coming out this weekend and I’ve got to go to Walmart and buy a lightsaber and also some peppermint schnapps for a Christmas party and some of those butter cookies in the round tin along with a gallon of eggnog and then fill my Paxil prescription for depression.