I walked into the bedroom toward my husband George’s dresser, on which sat ten piles of books. (Yes, George is usually reading about ten books at once.) “Is Robert Frost buried somewhere in here?” I asked, while starting to peek at the book spines one by one. “Ah, here he is!” I pulled out our hardback of Frost’s Complete Poems, its fifteenth printing (1963). I figured one of us had bought it in college or English Lit. grad school—and yup, here’s my signature on the first blank page.

“I want to re-memorize ‘Desert Places,’” I explained. “I remember the final line—‘To scare myself with my own desert places’—but the rest has gotten blurry.”

Getting comfy on the sofa downstairs, I read the poem:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less —
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Ah, yes, the first stanza comes back to me. It reminds me of another Frost poem that I’ve memorized: “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which also begins with the speaker passing a snowy field:

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.

Hmm, same iambic tetrameter and AABA rhyme scheme. But while “Stopping by Woods…” is easily accessible, “Desert Places” isn’t.

The first stanza isn’t much of a problem—though the tone is unexpected. Those doubled “f”-words in line 1 give a sense of rush: falling…falling…fast…fast, with the “oh” adding to the sense of urgency.

Where I always run into trouble, though, is in a single word of the second stanza’s first line: “The woods around it have it — it is theirs.” The first “it” is of course the “field.” But what on earth is the second “it”? And is it the same as the third?

When George comes downstairs, I ask his take on these “it”s. “Frost’s typical playfulness,” he says. “”Have “it” is like “’got it’—slangy.” I’m not quite convinced, but I move on.

And right there in the next line, with those “smothered” animals, the poem’s absences begin. Smothered animals can’t be seen; the snow is covering them. But why does Frost write “smothered” instead of “covered”? “Smothered” is creepier; it suggests being buried—that is, death’s total absence. As if it’s a prelude to the clearly stated “absence” of the following line:

I am too absent-spirited to count;

What am I to make of “absent-spirited”? Somehow, the speaker’s spirit is missing. Yet he’s there at the scene, looking at the nearly snow-covered field. And “to count”? I hear it as “to matter.” So, then: his spirit is so unpresent that he doesn’t matter to the scene.

Then his absent-spiritedness gets specified as “loneliness”:

The loneliness includes me unawares.

“Loneliness” has a different cast than “absence.” “Absence” is a statement of fact; “loneliness” is a feeling. A feeling of desolation. Now, since loneliness is a feeling, it can’t be attributed to the snow-covered scene; yet that’s exactly what Frost, daringly, is doing. Even further, the loneliness itself has consciousness: it “includes me unawares.” And while there’s the possibility that “unawares” applies to the speaker himself, this possibility gets eliminated by the next stanza, in which loneliness is the clear subject throughout:

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less —
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

So the loneliness has gotten eerier as the stanza proceeds, predicting the near future. First the loneliness will just be “more lonely.” (But does this even make sense? Can loneliness have degrees of itself? Frost is teasing us here.) Then the lonelier loneliness becomes “blanker”: more absent—as if absence could have degrees. But from “blanker” we move alliteratively to “benighted”—giving the snow itself a sinister moral dimension. And finally, the doubling negative of “expression”: there is absolutely nothing expressed, nothing communicated, by this scene.

As if this lonely, blank, benighted, expressionless scene weren’t terrifying enough, Frost moves in the final stanza to expand it to cosmic scale—

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.

—yet (so Frostian) playfully rhyming “spaces” with “race is.”

Finally, the poem’s closing lines, explaining why “they cannot scare me with their empty spaces”:

I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

All the emptiness, the absences, of the world outside (the speaker concludes) are nothing next to his inner emptiness: “my own desert places.” Yet, at the same time, Frost draws in that “have it” from stanza 2. He’s playing around again.

It’s a dark poem; that’s for sure. Yet throughout, the poetry itself lessens the darkness. That recurring “have it,” the regular meter, the rhymings throughout (especially that “spaces”/“race is”), the alliterations, —these (to my mind) lighten the gloom. The poem is at once playful and deeply unsettling. Frost, in his mastery, truly has it both ways.

And a bonus for me: in writing this post, I’ve re-memorized the poem.

Peggy Rosenthal has a PhD in English Literature. Her first published book was Words and Values, a close reading of popular language. Since then she has published widely on the spirituality of poetry, in periodicals such as America, The Christian Century, and Image, and in books that can be found here.

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