Quatrain

Poem Technique: Quatrain

Poem Example:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

Biographical Information: Robert Frost holds a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. "Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet," writes James M. Cox, "it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry." In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of nineteenth-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many nineteenth-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his twentieth-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O'Connor point out in Poems for Study, "Frost's poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century." Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

Explanation of Technique: A quatrain is a four line stanza or poem with an alternating rhyme scheme. Some examples are AABB, ABAB, ABBA, AABA. Each of the stanzas in this poem is a quatrain. Each stanza contains 4 lines. The first three stanzas have a AABA rhyme scheme, the last stanza has a AAAA rhyme scheme.

Interpretation of Poem: In this poem, a man is walking down a path with his horse. As the snow falls and covers the ground, they come across a dark forest. He pauses and gazes into the woods, even though he knows he must get to his destination. He is tempted to enter the dark woods, but then remembers that he has a long way to go. The man in the poem is walking through life, and when he is tired and night falls, he is tempted to give up. The woods look like a nice place to go, and a respite from the challenges of the road. The woods seem nice and deep, but dangers haunt you there. His horse reminds him that he can't give up now, he has to keep going. So he journeys on, getting to his final destination. This poem illustrates how giving up is easy, and it seems like the right way to go, but even if it's hard and cold, we have to keep going.

Visual Representation:



Explanation of Visual: I selected this image because it's the type of forest I pictured while reading the poem. Though it's very haunting and dark, it also seems welcoming and calm. If you entered this forest, you could forget all of your problems and be free of your worries. However, danger lurks in the forest, and you must stay clear of it, no matter how great it looks. That is what the poem was conveying.

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