Frost's “Desert Places”: Inner Darkness

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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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