Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) One thing which many readers of Robert Frost’s poetry may have wondered while reading his poems is: why does he repeat the same line at the end of his 1923 poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’? The repeated line ‘And miles to go before I sleep’ concludes what is probably Robert Frost’s second best-known poem. ‘ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ’ is, after ‘ The Road Not Taken ’, Robert Frost’s most widely anthologised and oft-quoted poem. Opening lines often attain a fame which the rest of the poem which they begin fails to achieve. Everyone knows ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, but how many people could quote the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18? And how many people can go beyond ‘April is the cruellest month’ and tell you precisely what completes that opening sentence of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land ? But Frost, if anything, had the opposite gift: he could close a poem like few other modern poets, and many of his most celebrated and cherished lines come towards the end of his poems, rather than at the start. ‘And miles to go before I sleep’ is one of the finest examples of this ‘art of closing’ which Frost had. What’s the Poem About? ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is spoken by a man who rides by some woods one evening during winter. He tells us that he thinks a man who owns the woods lives in the village some distance away. Frost concludes ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by telling us that, as inviting as the woods are, he has commitments elsewhere that he must honour, so he reluctantly needs to leave this place of peace and tranquillity and continue on his journey before he can sleep for the night. To interpret and perceive its deeper meaning, we need to consider the wider context of the poem. Rhyme and Reason Frost’s poem has a highly unusual and controlled rhyme scheme, and understanding this helps us to […]
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
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