“We will never be out of these woods” – The terrors and pleasures of Robert Frost

We are on a routine journey home; we are on the threshold of the universe, serenity mingling with awe; we are far from civilization and terribly near the ancient fears: separation, insignificance, darkness. (“He will not see me stopping” is one false step from “He will not hear me screaming.”) The boundaries between these conditions, never more than what we impose in order to stay sane, evaporate. And then comes the end, and another doubling — the most explicit one Frost ever wrote:

And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

It is the greatest pan-out in the history of verse. We draw away from a man alone in the woods and see man, alone in the woods. As the scale expands, the world diminishes, becomes a snow globe, shaken. And right then, just as we are grasping the nature of our situation — we’re fine; we’re exhilarated; we’re terrified — Frost has the balls to vanish. But he brought us here in the first place! He said we were about to head home! — but no. We are stopping here. We are midway through our journey, no Virgil, no nothing, alone, and this place we are in (like this poem we are in) is lovely. And it is dark. And it is deep. Translation: We are lucky to be here; we are sane to be scared; we are not getting out anytime soon. In point of fact, we are not getting out at all. Not in this lifetime, anyway. We will never be out of these woods.