The Dark Woods: Image Becomes Symbol

"Into My Own," the first poem in Frost's first book, A Boy's Will, begins, One of my wishes is that those dark trees, So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze, Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom, But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
In "A Dream Pang," he begins I had withdrawn in forest, and my song Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway; And to the forest edge .....
And "The Vantage Point" starts If tired of trees I seek again mankind
And the last poem in A Boy's Will begins Out through the fields and the woods
If read over the body of his work, Frost's tree imagery becomes a powerful cumulative symbol. Trees become forest and then woods, dark woods and eventually a pitch dark limitless grove. Frost's limited use of trees as a positive image occurs in "Birches" and "A Young Birch" where this, his favorite tree, the gray birch (Betula populifolia) relies "on its beauty to the air." But in general Frost's trees are portentous and ominous.

The pine tree in "The Oft-Repeated Dream," threatens the woman inside. The forest in "Spring Pools" has the power to sweep away the tender flowers below. The forest in "On Going Unnoticed," asks, "What are you...? to the speaker who "grasps the bark by a rugged pleat,/ And looks up small from the forest's feet."

Frost often extends his concern to the leaves of trees, as in "In Hardwood Groves," Before the leaves can mount again To fill the trees with another shade, They must go down past things coming up. They must do down into the dark decayed.
The speaker becomes weary as a leaf treader, and playful as a leaf gatherer. In "October," he says whimsically the heart may be beguiled if the leaves will fall slowly, for the grape's sake. In comparing leaves and flowers, the speaker admits "Leaves are all my darker mood." And even in Frost's most affirmative tree poem "Birches," he stops to say, "It's when I'm weary of considerations, And life is too much like a pathless wood."

One may observe that Frost's poems are generally set in New England. This region of the United States is full of forest with a potent literary tradition going back to Longfellow's and Hawthorne's forest primeval. His setting is nature, rural 19th century America. Indeed Frost's landscape is not as mental as Emily Dickinson and is far removed from the psychological landscapes of Yeats and Eliot. Frost set his poetry in New England because he loved it.

Frost was a restless man who enjoyed walking and exploring the rural places where he lived. His idea of nature is very real and very much on the ground. He said, "Poetry is gloating, gloating on the facts, just facts." He very seldom "gets up fanciful things." On his walks, he delighted in making all kinds of botanical and geological observations. He loved ferns and wild flowers and trees and could name them all.

Frost was well aware of the classic traditions of pastoral and nature poetry, but disavowed himself a "nature poet." He said, "there is almost always a person in my poems" and clearly the poem is about the person's psychology. He is not trying to tell you how nature works. He was not a pantheist nor a transcendentalist. He believes that nature has a "correspondence" with man and that sometimes man is blessed with a "nature favor," that is a special sight beheld with wonder, such as he describes in "The Most of It," "Two Look at Two," or "Questioning Faces."

The transition of trees to forest to woods to dark woods runs throughout Frost culminating in "The Draft Horse," in a pitch dark limitless grove, where a couple are gripped in a fateful and terrifying event that forces them to lose control over a simple ride home in their horse-drawn buggy.

Trees are a powerful figure for Frost, but again he is following a poetic tradition that can be traced back to the classics, especially Virgil's pastorals, which Frost read in high school and admired all his life. Trees are part of the figurative landscape that Dante used in his opening lines of the Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say What was the forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear. So bitter is it, death is little more.
The expression "lost in the woods" is right out of Dante in using the tangle of tree growth to symbolize our inability to go forward and straight. "Babes in the woods," evokes innocence exposed to some sort of dark force. It is clear that Frost loves his trees and embraces them as part of his "darker mood," and yet resists their pull too: As I came to the edge of the woods Thrush music - hark! ...... Far in the pillared darkness, Thrush music went-- Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament. But no - I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn't been.
Frost's trees accumulate over the body of his work, but they cannot be taken to mean one thing. They have different colors and textures as well as contradictions. In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," he says in his famous final stanza,
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
One may ask, is the dark and deep part of the loveliness, or is it both lovely and dark and deep. Taken that way, the woods hold opposing qualities. This is vintage Frost - they refuse to be pinned down. Trees are part of his different moods.