Desert Places

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Desert Places

by Robert Frost

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 animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-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 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.

__________________________

Desert Places is a 16 lie poem. Each line containing ten syllables. The lines are divided into four quatrains, with each of the quatrains containing an AABA rhyme scheme.

The poem is about loneliness, and the author executes the discussion through a comparison with natural bareness.

Stanza One:

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.

In the first stanza, the Speaker describes the setting. Two things are falling in line one – the snow and the night. The lines describe lessening signs of life and they indicate that this change is happening quickly “fast, oh, fast.” This sets the mood, bleakness, for the rest of the piece.

Frost uses alliteration in line one and then continues throughout the rest of the poem.

Stanza Two:

The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

The bleak tone ratchets up in this stanza. The Speaker broadens the scope of those effected by the night and snow to include the animals. He uses an overtly violent and negative word, “smothered,” to evoke a sense of death and to describe their circumstances. In line seven, the Speaker loops himself into the scene’s setting, describing himself as “absent-spirited” – another word evoking death. In line eight, he gives name to the prevailing spirit of the piece – loneliness – and says that the feeling includes himself though he is unaware. consciously.

Stanza Three:

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 to express.

After introducing the word in line eight, the Speaker uses a variant of loneliness another three times in lines nine and ten. Just in case you missed the theme in line eight, the Speaker is making certain that you understand it through repetition. The Speaker creates a parallel between his emotions and the falling of the snow, stating that both are only going to to increate.

As mentioned above, Frost uses alliteration throughout the poem and we see that in this stanza by repeatedly using “b” words.

The stanza gives the feeling of erasure. Rather than simply covering up life, line twelve implies that the snow – and his loneliness – is erasing life. We see this in the way that he says “nothing to express” as though what once existed has died.

Stanza Four:

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.

In the poem’s final stanza, instead of continuing the parallel of his feelings with the snowfall, the Speaker contrasts the lonely scene around him with the loneliness he feels. He personifies the world, or perhaps God, as “they,” implying that the scene he has described is intentionally and wittingly antagonistic, and is attempting to scare him. He even expands upon the snowy setting to include emptiness in the sky as well. By doing this, the Speaker broadens the scope of the scene to include something *always* largely empty. The Reader cannot but help to read into this expansion that his lonely feelings are similarly permanent. Rather than a moment of melancholy, we learn, brought about by a sudden night time snowfall, the Speaker’s loneliness is apparently always present – as the space in the sky is, too.

The Speaker says that the attempt to scare him via this natural external scene does not work because he has his own inner loneliness with which to contend. He describes his own lonely lifeless feelings as “desert places” within.

Overall, the poem is a work dealing thematically with depression and isolation.