Thursday, July 10, 2014

Stopping by Commas on a Snowy Evening


Mack Hall, HSG


6 July 2014

 

Stopping by Commas on a Snowy Evening

 

An acquaintance, disagreeing with some fashionable and muddy deconstruction in a newspaper article, defended the obvious in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  She was exactly right to do so.

 

Mr. Frost wrote this perfect little poem in 1922, and for the rest of his long life people told him what he really meant by it.  His insistence that the poem was about stopping by woods on a snowy evening and nothing more was taken as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge prevarication, as if it were unthinkable that anyone should ever speak plainly about anything.

 

One very common – and very wrong - interpretation is that the poem is about suicide.  This allegation is based on a line in the last stanza: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”  The woods are said to be symbolic of death, and the last line (“But I have promises to keep…”) are the speaker’s repudiation of the temptation to suicide. 

 

This spurious argument is built on the flimsiest of foundations, a comma that doesn’t even exist.  The claim is that because there is no Oxford comma – the comma preceding “and” – in “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” then it follows that the woods are lovely because they are dark and deep, reflecting a desire for death.

 

Blaming something on a comma that isn’t there is too, too thin, but it sells articles to journals and newspapers, rather like the recycled twaddle that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare.

 

Commas can indicate a separation of thoughts, a pause for breath, or a pause in speaking.  Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1952) gives four columns of small print to the comma, and after reading all that the reader still isn’t sure what a comma is for. 

 

But let us narrow our search to the topic at hand, a line of Frost, and consider the comma as used in series.  We say that the colors of our flag are red, white, and blue.  The commas separate each item in order to give them equal weight:

 

Red.

 

White.

 

Blue.

 

However, Mr. Frost says that his friend’s woods are “lovely, dark and deep,” a series of three items with only one comma.  Thus the argument that these are not three discrete (spelled “discrete,” meaning separate, not “discreet,” meaning subtle) things, but rather one thing (“lovely”) as proven by “dark and deep.”

 

The problem is the absence of the Oxford comma (I don’t know how a comma or a shoe can be Oxonian), which as a fashion comes and goes.  One generation holds as an article of faith that the colors of our flag should be written as “red, white, and blue,” and the next generation is ready to take to the barricades in defense of “red, white and blue” sans Oxford comma.

 

Robert Frost wrote “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” with only one comma because omitting the Oxford comma was the usual punctuation of his time.  There is no hidden meaning in this.

 

The defense of this questionable usage is that when items are listed in a series the reader already knows that there are items, that they are different items, and that they are in a series.

 

This argument fails, in Mr. Frost’s time or in ours, because if any comma is unnecessary in a series because of an omniscient reader, then why should the series be cluttered with commas at all?  Thus, according to the No Oxford Comma crowd, if we make a list of children who are, for instance, taking a Sunday school trip, we can safely and accurately list them as “Mandy Taylor Brooke Kelly John Conrad McKenzie Sebastian Madison,” and so on.

 

The confusion is obvious: Are Mandy and Taylor two different children, or is Mandy Taylor one child and Brooke Kelly another?

 

If we write of our flag that the colors are red, white and blue, do we then say that there are only two categories, one of them red and the other a portmanteau of white and blue?

 

The Oxford comma is useful for clarifying items in series.  Mr. Frost, however, did not employ it.  The lapse is hardly a fault, but it does give the sort of people who are always telling others what they really mean an excuse for deconstructing (that is, botching it) a given line that, even with a comma missing, is perfectly clear.

 

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is what its author said it is, and it is a snowflake-brilliant poem of great artistry crafted in iambic tetrameter, clear monosyllables, and a connect-everything rhyme scheme of AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.

 

Read it, and live.

 

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