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Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness - College Term Papers

Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness

C.K. Williams said, “poetry confronts in the most clear-eyed way just those emotions which consciousness wished to slide by,” and in “Desert Places” Robert Frost makes the reader not only visualize the cause of these emotions, but feel them also. Throughout the four stanzas of “Desert Places,” Frost describes a solitary walk through desolate snow covered woods. Each stanza describes a portion of his walk, and his inner descent into vacancy. Throughout “Desert Places,” Frost uses simple everyday images to create powerful feelings of loneliness and desolation, which in turn give the reader a mental picture of what the speaker sees and feels.
Frost begins the poem with “snow falling and ...

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in the mind of the reader, of a man just beginning to reveal his inner “darkness”.
As the second stanza begins, the speaker has reached the borderline of the quickly darkening woods, and it seems as though he has paused in his walking, as if to stop and ponder his own vacancy and loneliness. In lines five and six, Frost alludes to what may be the cause of the speaker’s inner vacancy: “The woods around it have it – it is theirs/All animals are smothered in their lairs” (lines 5-6). “It” stands for the spirit that in line seven Frost states the speaker is missing: “I am too absent-spirited to count.” In the poem, to “count” means to be distinguishable among the darkness. The fact that he does not count makes him indistinguishable among the woods and animals, which only adds to his feelings of inner vacancy and the overall desolance of the poem.
In line eleven, Frost uses the image of a “blander whiteness” in an almost symbolic way, yet with a twist of irony. The image of ...

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Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness. (2004, October 26). Retrieved January 22, 2025, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Frosts-Desert-Places-Inner-Darkness/16527

"Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 26 Oct. 2004. Web. 22 Jan. 2025. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Frosts-Desert-Places-Inner-Darkness/16527>

"Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness." Essayworld.com. October 26, 2004. Accessed January 22, 2025. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/Frosts-Desert-Places-Inner-Darkness/16527.

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 10/26/2004 03:54:23 PM
Category: Poetry & Poets
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 818
Pages: 3

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