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Analysis Of Robert Frost's Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

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As Freud pointed out at the beginning of the twentieth-century dreams are "the royal road to the unconscious" ("The Interpretation of Dreams," n.p.). As encrypted messages addressed by the irrational unconscious to the rational consciousness dreams hence act as vehicle between both entities occurring in an intermediary subconscious layer. Similarly poetry might be considered as a medium bridging the collective unconscious and the conditioned mindset of a given culture, by imprinting symbolic content onto the subconscious interface. Such a comparison is pushed forward and takes a figurative turn in Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The structural elements of the poem, as well as the landscape, the scene and the characters converge to draw a perfect allegory for a dream, through which Frost implies …show more content…

Its stanzaic arrangement consists of four quatrains each made of four tetrametric verses delivering a perfectly symmetrical pattern, horizontally as vertically. Such a mirroring equilibrium renders, more than an idiosyncratic identity, the abstract idea of an infinite order, whereof the dream would only represent an excerpt. Similarly, a dream appears as a sample cut out of the unconscious, reflecting beyond itself an all-pervading semiotic system. Moreover, the rhyme scheme consists of a peculiar set of interlocking rubayiat: AABA - BBCB - CCDC - DDDD, displaying a series of heterogeneous clusters flimsily and oddly, nonetheless structurally interconnected; the scheme unfolds consistently until it reaches a full-rhymed stanza emphasizing the effect of a rupture. Likewise, dreams are sequences of apparently awkward symbolic aggregates nevertheless functionally bound by a thin line of logical meaning; the dream eventually ends when the dreamer regains consciousness. Both dreams and Frost's poem thus exhibit a similar texture, connectedness and

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