Real Poetry Part 2: The Antidote to the Ersatz and Confused

A great example of a real poem is one of Robert Frost’s most famous works: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” danm12/Shutterstock

In Part 1 of this extended article, I looked at what poetry can do better than any other art form: convey complex ideas and profound emotional states and express what is otherwise inexpressible. I call this “real” poetry.

Real poetry can do this by using simple language and without psychological theories. It can set up inexhaustible resonances that readers can return to again and again for their souls’ refreshment. In the second part, I’ll look at a real poem and elaborate on how it achieves its aim.

The Genius of ‘Real’ Poetry

A great example of a real poem is one of Robert Frost’s most famous works: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

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.

Frost’s poem, easy to memorize, is deceptively simple, yet it contains profound and important messages that can be reflected on endlessly.

Its structure compounds its meaning and images. Rhythmically, it has the wonderful four-beat iambic meter, which mirrors the smooth movement on such a dark night. The lines are end-stopped, just like the little horse who stops and thinks it “queer.” In other words, each line makes sense without necessarily running into the next line. Indeed, the first line itself is one whole sentence.

Though simple, the first sentence’s syntax is reversed. The normal sentence structure would be: “I think I know whose woods these are,” but that blandness would create no mystery. Beginning with the word “whose” immediately poses a question in readers’ minds.

"Winter in Yosemite," 19th century, by Albert Bierstadt. Oil on canvas. Public Domain

The virtually unobtrusive interlocking triple rhyme scheme ends in a finality of five rhymes: sweep, deep, keep, sleep, and sleep (an identical rhyme). Usually when there’s too much rhyming, the effect is banal or clichéd, but here, the effect is profoundly satisfying and has a a feeling of inevitability. It’s like the poem is saying, in a world of darkness, cold, and even chaos, there is order, there is rhyme. Of course, one has to stop the horse to see it and hear it.

Focusing on the diction a moment: Readers see that nearly 70 percent of the words are monosyllabic. The rest, except one, are bisyllabic (evening I would read “eve-ning,” though it could be “eve-en-ing”). That leaves one word, coming right near the end, “promises,” that is genuinely trisyllabic.

What to make of this? Monosyllabic words create a steady, almost meditative cadence. Each word lands like a soft footstep or a gentle snowfall. The simplicity and repetitive rhythm evoke the quiet serenity of the woods. The natural pauses in such short words leave space for reflection, reinforcing the speaker’s calm, though slightly hesitant, mood.

The bisyllabic words tend to point to elsewhere—the village, the farmhouse—slight distractions from the nowness and removed the woods.

"Winter Landscape with Snow-covered Trees," between circa 1670–80, by Jacob van Ruisdael. Oil on canvas. Städel Museum, Frankfurt. Public Domain

How beguiling the woods are. Is there an allusion to Dante’s first stanza of “The Divine Comedy”?

Midway upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

In Frost’s poem, the heavyweight, trisyllabic word comes in “promises to keep.” In other words, it adds a moral or spiritual dimension to things: a promise is to keep one’s word. But keeping one’s word regarding what? The repetition of that magical word “sleep”—“sleep” here is suggestive, symbolic, and metaphorical—points to the final sleep of death. It’s as if we were in some sort of covenant with life before it ended. We have a duty not to stop but to press on.

Add to this the sense of intriguing mystery throughout the whole poem. In addition to “whose woods,” mentioned in the first line, we wonder whose house, and where exactly are we? And why are we outside on the “darkest evening of the year”?

A Deep Meaning

Some of Frost's famous poems reflected real-life moments such as navigating hope amid a dark night of the soul. danm12/Shutterstock

A sense of darkness and hope pervade the poem; it does so in a way that reflects what real life is like. All of us experience darkness at least at some time in our life, and yet, too, we also know hope. Hope indeed sustains us as we continue our journey, our personal odyssey.

Although this discussion hardly does the poem justice, we do begin to see that the line “And miles to go before I sleep” is a universe away from the repetition of “Four legs good, two legs bad” that we considered in Part 1 of this article. Frost is exploring the mystery of life; the other is just political sloganeering (deliberate, of course, on George Orwell’s part). Frost invites us to feel and participate in life as it really is; the other invites us to label and hate those who are different from us.

We need real poetry in education, and, as much as possible, we need to avoid ersatz poetry. The only use of ersatz poetry is to occasionally contrast it with real poetry. If teachers can no longer discern the difference between the two, then teachers need to go back to the classics and study them.

It’s a strange paradox that even ersatz poetry websites pay tribute to real poetry. The most popular poets on these sites are poems and features by real poets and of real poems. The number of website visits on the real stuff doesn’t lie. As podcaster and poet Andrew Benson Brown reports, the traffic on the world’s most popular English poetry sites goes for the classics, with Dylan Thomas and Robert Frost in the number 1 and 2 positions.

We also have to look for the real poetry being written today. It’s not to be found by prize-winning poets or vaunted by premiere institutions. No, we have to go elsewhere to find the real poets. New York is—perhaps strangely—a good place to start; it’s the home of The Society of Classical Poets. You won’t regret exploring its site because its content offers food for the soul.

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