This is my final essay for that English class. I wrote it on Robert Frost's Desert Places. Here is a link to the poem itself: http://www.internal.org/Robert_Frost/Desert_Places. This type of literary analysis based on figurative language, punctuation, and line breaks (lineation) is what I learned to do in this class. As we were told over and over again "it's not what the words mean, it's how they mean", which is a quote from somebody, but it wasn't testable material so I didn't write it down!
On Deserts, Desertion,
and Desolation
The title of Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” might
seem like a misnomer, considering how much of the poem describes frozen precipitation. Snow is the antithesis of the dry and arid
landscape that the title seems to be invoking. However, while “desert” is a noun describing
an ecosystem, it is also, as used here, an adjective, “deserted”, which not
only denotes an empty place, but one that is abandoned. The description of the poem’s setting is told
from the subjective view of the speaker, in which he links the falling snow to abandonment
and desertion. This physical description
of place is a metaphor that likens his internal places, his state of mind, to
the desolate landscape. “Desert Places” not
only refers to the setting, but illustrates the metaphor that encompasses the
speaker’s own existence.
The
lineation of the two iterations of “Desert Places” (title, 16) conjures imagery
of abandoned and desolate places that is reinforced by their spatial isolation
in the poem. As the title, “Desert Places”
is isolated by blankness at the top of the page, which physically reiterates
its meaning of vacancy. Since the phrase
is the first image we encounter, its connotation colours the rest of the poem. “Desert places” (16) are also the last words
of the poem and are juxtaposed with a page of empty whiteness “with nothing to
express” (12). As the final two words, the
phrase encapsulates the poem’s metaphor about desolation that describes the
speaker’s own life.
The
imagery in and sound of the poem deepens the meanings of “Desert Places” by
emphasizing feelings of loneliness and silence. The speaker says the snow “smothered the
animals” (6) which connotes the suffocation of the animals, after which, the
wood will be deserted of life. The sound
of the poem also reinforces this feeling of emptiness by mimicking the quiet solitude of a snowy evening. The poem is easier to read silently than
aloud due to its surprising punctuation.
For example, lines five and six in the second stanza both end with a
period, which is difficult to read, since the lines do not follow the expected pattern
of commas established in first stanza.
The diction and lineation describing the snowfall continue
to enrich our understanding of the speaker’s absolute physical isolation. The snow on the ground, “covered smooth” (3),
erases all visible structure and form so that the landscape becomes
one-dimensional and featureless. In line
two, “snow” is placed at the end of the line, dangling beyond the other words
in a blank expanse of white-as-snow page.
This is also the longest line of the first stanza, isolating the word vertically
as well as horizontally. The absence of
enjambment reinforces these images of snowy emptiness. The line ends with a comma, making the reader
pause slightly and contemplate the deserted page and the loneliness of
snow.
The broader descriptions of the scene reinforce the
images of desertion and loneliness introduced in the title. The physical aspects of the poem are set “in
a field” (2). “Field” has connotations
of agriculture and human habitation.
However, this is not a tended, productive landscape. It is covered in “weeds and stubble” (4),
indicating that the field is abandoned: a deserted place. The speaker’s description of the scene gives
it an evil hue, despite snow not being inherently evil. He describes the snow as “benighted” (11),
which implies that the snow is morally dark or evil. The speaker also says the snow has “no
expression, nothing to express” (12). The
snow is completely devoid of thoughts and personality. These twisted imaginings of inanimate objects
originate in a mind that is itself a “desert place” (16).
These non-specific references to “places” in the title
and line 16 are both a physical location and a figurative place. This duality allows us to interpret “places”
as referring to both the landscape and the speaker’s state of mind. The characteristics of one transfer to the
other in a metaphor where the lonely and abandoned field is the source and the
speaker is the target. Furthermore, since
“desert places” is plural, it supports the interpretation of the two deserted
locations where one is a metaphor for the other. Thus, “desert places” (title, 16) both
describes the speaker and connects the vacant scene to him.
In the third stanza, the speaker describes himself as
spiritually empty and further links himself to the physical “desert places”. In line seven, the speaker calls himself
“absent-spirited.” “Spirit” can connote
“soul” and the defining aspects of humanity: sentience and consciousness. By calling himself “absent-spirited” (7), the
speaker implies he has lost these aspects of his humanity.. He is vacant like the snow that smothered the
animals and erased the landscape. He is
hollow; the loneliness sweeping through the woods does not recognize him and is
“unaware” (8) of his existence.
With the fourth stanza, the language of the poem
switches from depicting the landscape to addressing the speaker’s internal
places. He further describes his fears
and personal vacancy in relation to the themes of desolation created earlier in
the poem. He says, “I have it in me” (15),
where “it” represents all the imagery of vacancy and death. “It” is “in” him; he is empty. In the last line, the speaker expresses ownership
of the “desert places”, he calls them “my own” (16).
In this poem, there is a progression from literal imagery
to figurative interpretation that links the deserted exterior landscape to the internal
emptiness of the speaker. The speaker is
deserted by life and has “nothing to express” (12), as he is vacant, flat snow.
The speaker reveals his emotions by
comparing them to a desolate winter scene where everything is uniform and
dead. He is without hope and
companionship – a deserted person in a deserted place. Like a holograph, where each unit of
information contains the whole image, “desert places” (16, title) encompasses
the whole poem: the speaker, the forest, and how they are connected.
Work Cited
Frost, Robert.
“Desert Places.” 20th-Century Poetry and
Poetics. Ed. Gary Geddes. 5th ed. Don
Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2006. 54-55.
