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.
-30-
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