The Solitary Waggoner: An Etonymic Analysis of Frosts Stopping by Woods The narrator in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is out

on a nocturnal mission: he has promises to keep, and miles to go before he can keep them. Why, then, does he pause? He is evidently engaged in something covert, something done in the dark, indeed in the shadows of the years darkest evening. It is something slightly shameful, something the narrator would not want the woods owner to see him doing. Whatever it is embarrasses his little horse, who believes a mistake is being made, that something queer (a word suggestive of sexual deviancy) is going on. What could that be? A close reading of the poem suggests that the narrator has stopped to masturbate1. The poet is alone. All other human beings are far away, in the village or the distant farmhouse. Tellingly, the description of a landscape made white--snowy, frozen, covered with downy flakeomits only one obvious correlative word: frost. The poems diction, with this coy hint at the poets own name2, suggests that the poem is about something pertaining deeply but embarrassingly to the poet himself, something so embarrassing that he demurs to give his name. This is reinforced by the use of the word bell and the ringing (that is, the tolling) of the bell by the poets horse (He gives his harness bells a shake). For John Donne, No man is an island, entire of itself; one should not ask for whom the bell tolls because it tolls for thee. Here, conversely, the poet is entire of himself, completely alone, distant from house, village and farmhouse, as if on an island, and is indeed tolling a bell: his own (see the discussion of the figure of the ringing bell as orgasm infra.) For Donne, society is of a piece and comprises all men; for the poet on this evening, there is no intercourse with others, social or sexual--there is only the self and its solitary pleasures. Throughout the poem, Frost deftly employs the technique of using one word to suggest two things, or many. The poems title, which describes a man stopping by woods, is the first use of this device. The word by carries two meanings: position (a cat sat by a window); and agency (a running back was headed for the end zone until stopped by a bruising tackle). Frosts reader at first understands that the poet has stopped near the woods; then the reader also realizes that the poet has decided to stop because of the woods. Since wood is a slang term for an erection (a woody)3, the poems title signals that the poet, finding himself alone at night near a forest in a state of unexpected sexual arousal, has stopped to attend to it. The pluralization of wood
1

Little (little horse) is a word often coupled with child (e.g., and a little child shall lead them, Isaiah 11:6). This suggests the horses sexual innocence. Thus it is sexual activity is the source of the horses discomfort. This is reinforced when the horse gives his harness bells a shake thereby making himself into a shaker--that is, one who shuns sexual activity. 2 For a discussion of a similar example of reference by omission, see Paul Muldoons discussion of W. B. Yeats All Hallows Eve in The End of the Poem, wherein Muldoon argues that by filling the first stanza with images of wine while omitting the obvious correlative, lees, Yeats refers to his wife, Georgie HydeLees. 3 Note, too, the implied compounding word, pecker, slang for penis.

emphasizes this: he has stopped by one wood, a forest, because of his other wood, his aroused sex organ. The poet drives the point home by using the word wood again in lines 4, 7 and 13. This pattern of rhythmic repetition is mirrors the repetitive motion of copulation. The repetition also emphasizes the poets obsession with his wood: as the most often repeated word in the poem, wood rules the poems diction and also the poets consciousness by its constant reappearance, its urgent insistence that it be attended to, that it be relieved of the stress4 of arousal not acted upon. The figure of the horse is similarly multilayered. Riding a horse was a common metaphor for sexual intercourse in the ancient world. Thus a Roman fresco at Pompeii depicts a man penetrating a woman from the rear, pretending to ride her with one hand in the air as if holding her reins.5 Thus, to like effect, Lear: Let copulation thrive. . .The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes tot/With a more riotous appetite (King Lear, V:4). A male horse hired out to breed mares is a stud, which is also slang for a sexually active man. Stud also refers to a kind of board (wood) used in building, and in that sense is etymologically related to stick and staff, both words with phallic overtones. A frost stud is a large-headed horseshoe nail (a phallic symbol) that protrudes below the horseshoe6, an implicit reference to Frosts own sexuality. The horse is specifically the poets little horse, an endearment that is likely the poets affectionate diminutive for his sex organ; Elvis Presley, for example, called his penis Little Elvis7. Consider, then, how the phrase He gives his harness bells a shake is layered with implicit meanings. By adding but a letter to one word and changing a letter in another, the line is rendered bluntly phallic: He gives his har[d]ness b[a]lls a shake; that is, he (nominally the horse, but implicitly the poet via the identification of the little horse with Frosts penis) manipulates his erect sex organ and his scrotum. Continuing this linguistic doubleness, the poet chooses shake, a word that rhymes with and is but a single letter distant from snake, which is both slang for the penis and which summons up the serpent of Eden. And, indeed, just as the serpent spoiled Eden through the transmission of sexual knowledge (and the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked8), the poet, through the Onanistic spilling of his seed (downy flake) on the ground, soils the garden-like setting in which he pauses. Of course, shake also half-rhymes with stroke, and is further associated with stroke because it is a bell that is shaken, bell and stroke being words that are frequently paired (e.g., Every stroke that the death-bell tolled/Cried woe to Barbara Allen,9; cf. The stroke of midnight with its implicit reference to a clock-tower bell.) The woodsthat is, the object the insistent thought of which has seized the poets mind and stopped him on his journeyare also dark and deep. Deep is often
4
5

Wood is the stressed syllable of each foot in which it appears. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pompeii_brothel_2.jpg 6 Blood, D. C., V. P. Studdert and C. C. Gay, Saunders Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary 3rd Edition (Elsevier). 7 Albert Goldman, quoted in Images of Elvis Presley in American Culture: 1977-1997, George Plasketes. Haworth Press: 1997. p. 202. 8 Genesis 3:7, King James Version 9 Var. of Child, The English Ballades, 84.

conjoined to hole (vagina10), and, as Lear vividly reminds us, darkness is profoundly associated with the female genitalia (King Lear, V:4): Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiend's. There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit; burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah! And in the proliferation of plant life that makes up the woods, one expects to find a bush, vulgar slang for the female pudendum11 (note the juxtaposition of wood/bush with dark and deep and see the discussion infra). The poet is distracted, then, by a fantasy involving a womans sex organs. He notes that there is no farmhouse near. The farmhouse is the archetypal locus of illicit sex between men and eager young women in innumerable farmers daughter jokes that were undoubtedly known to Frost, and the use of the term suggests his longing for an absent female sexual partner. Wind, too, functions on several levels to summon up thoughts of male masturbation. It evokes its companion-word, horn (e.g., Spenser, to wind his horn under the castle wall), a word which in turn evokes a phallus-like object (e.g., saddle hornwhich itself connects back to horse). Horn refers doubly to sexual desire (horny) and illicit sexual activity (a cuckolded husband was said to wear horns). As a transitive verb, wind means to twist or coil, especially a cylindrical object like a rope, hinting at what the poets hands are about around his sex organ.12 And sweep in the preceding line both implies a repetitive back-and-forth manual motion like that of male masturbation and, again, is an action connected with a hard, cylindrical, quasi-phallic object, a broomstick (which is, of course, made of wood). The horse in the poem shakes his bell. The Sexual slang holds that a man who has brought a woman to orgasm has rung her bell13; thus in the poem the poet (the horse) has brought himself to climax (has rung his own bell). At last, then, despite his guilt and the noisy distraction created by his horse, the poet is able to achieve sexual as well as narrative climax: The only other sounds the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake.14 Easy wind is fraught with sexual implications. It evokes the exhalation of breath upon reaching orgasm. Its implied half
10

Vagina. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners: 4thEd. HarperCollins Publishers: London. 1983. http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/vagina. 11 Bush. Partridge, Eric, Tom Dalzell, Terry Victor. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Routledge. 2007. 12 Note, too, that by shaking his bell the horse necessarily rings it. To make a ring is to form a circle, which is the posture of a mans hand and fingers around the shaft of his penis during masturbation. Similarly, wring, a homonym of ring, implies a masturbatory twisting motion. One who winds a rope into a coil is said to snake the rope (see discussion supra); thus wind, too, carries phallic and masturbatory echoes. And, interestingly, queer derives from the Indo-European twerk, a transitive verb meaning to wind or twist. 13 Sex-lexis.com: the language of love. 14 Flake is etymologically related to an Old Norse verb meaning to skin or to flay, suggesting a peeling back of the (fore)skin.

rhyme with oozy suggests the expelling of a viscous liquid, a suggestion that is amplified by the reference to downy flake, for a snowfall is nothing more than a cloudy whiteness made up of innumerable microscopic, separate and individually unique particles, just as semen is composed of sperm cells. Since frost is the whiteness that covers the ground and lake is an anagram for leak, frozen lake implies frost[s] leak, or the poets ejaculation. The repetition of wood here reaches its own climax: wood is a half rhyme for weed, which both rhymes with seed (sperm) and also denotes a plant that grows in abundance when seed is scattered on the ground15. The horse is hitched to a wagon. In the poems rural setting (far from the village. . .without a farmhouse near), a man would use a wagon to haul a burden, that is, a load (wagonload). This burden is finally eased (easy) by the wind, i.e., by that which blows; the poet, then, has finally blown his load. Thus relieved, he may at last attend to the promises which he must keep. True, there are still miles to go; but at last he can go--because he has first come. The conventional exegesis of the poem holds that it depicts a man half in love with easeful death. Even that reading, however, supports an alternative, masturbatory interpretation. In Elizabethan literature, to die was to have an orgasm. Thus Shakespeare writes in Much Ado About Nothing, I will live in thy heart and die in thy lap; and, again, in King Lear, I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom. The modern French euphemism for orgasm is la petite mort. Yes, the poet does wish to die, but in the Elizabethan sense as well as the literal sense. Hamlet, too, longs to die, to sleep, perchance to dream/Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. Frosts poem echoes Hamlet not only through the poets implicit longing to die but also in his explicit longing to sleep (miles to go before I sleep). Orgasm is, of course, often followed by sleep.16 The use of lovely also calls up the act of love, or, in this instance, self-love. Once the layers of the poem are peeled back through the process of what Harold Bloom calls romanc[ing] the etonym17, it is apparent that, at a deep level, the poem is about a man who, alone and experiencing sudden sexual arousal in an unpopulated setting, pauses to satisfy himself. The night is dark, but the landscape now glistens in the self-generated whitenessthe frost--with which the Onanistic poet, Frost, has figuratively covered it. His nocturnal mission has turned into a nocturnal emission. He is the very exemplar of what in law is called a servant out on a frolic of his own. Given the poets inclination to hint at meanings by use of half rhymes and etymological layering, Frosts private title for the poem could well have been Stroking My Wood on a Snowy Evening. --Alfred Reddix Holston
15

And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother Genesis 38:9, King James Version; cf. wind in the sense of windfall or a scattering of (seed-bearing) fruit on the ground. 16 Consummation is itself a word that is used to denote sexual intercourse between a newlywed man and wife. 17 Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers 2004, p. 3.