Poets and Poems: Robert Frost, Wendell Berry, and the Woods

One poet’s poem can serve as a commentary on another poet’s poem, allowing us insights into the minds of both.

After last week’s discussion at Tweetspeak Poetry on Robert Frost and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I started reading Wendell Berry’s recent collection, This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems. One of the included poems, first published in 1979 and collected in The Timbered Choir in 1999, is untitled but generally known by its first line, “The bell calls in the town.”

I read a first line like that, and I’m immediately reminded of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (“His house in the village though”). As it turns out, both poems used the woods as an important element, perhaps the important element. Both use the idea of a journey or pilgrimage. And both offer a contrast between natural and man-made or man-created, faint as it might be in the Frost poem.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Jana Illnerova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.