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摘要:美国著名田园诗人罗伯特·弗罗斯特一生创作了许多田园诗歌, 而这些田园诗朴素无华, 含义隽永, 他的诗句寓深刻的思考和哲理于平淡无奇的内容和简洁朴实的诗句之中。本文重点分析了他的两首田园诗代表作《未选择的路》和《雪夜林边停》里所蕴含的深刻哲理,以期使读者对诗人的诗歌有个更透彻和全面的了解。
关键词:罗伯特·弗罗斯特;哲学思想;田园诗歌
中图分类号:I106 文献标识码:A文章编号:1009-0118(2010)-05-0254-02
Introduction
Robert Lee Frost is one of the most beloved American poets, whose work was made familiar with classrooms and lecture platforms. He was a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and recognized one of the best American poets of the twentieth century. Frost used a highly colloquial style, avoiding words that would seem unusual or unnatural (Chritophor, 2006:15). His poems are simple at first sight, but demand readers for deep reading to grasp further meaning beyond surface. Most of Frost' s poems were very carefully constructed, yet he made them seem effortless by using colloquial language, conversational rhythms. As a pastoral poet, Frost experienced and traveled a lot. Frost has so often written about the rural landscape and wildlife that one can hardly avoid thinking of him as a nature poet. The poetry of Robert Frost often combined pastoral imagery with solitary philosophical themes. They fully reflect Frost's philosophy and thinking behind the simple and plain lines. He often associated his poems with rural New England. He makes his New England universal in meaning and implication ( Hamilton, 1994). Fullness of philosophical thoughts is the main characteristics of Frost's poems. In our attempt to understand Frost's thoughts and true meaning of his poems, the idea of analyzing the author's philosophical meaning proves useful. To illastrate it and improve the reader's understanding, l set two typical examples of Robert Frost's pastoral poems.
Philosophical Thoughts in The Road Not Taken
The Road Not Taken is one of Frost's most popular poems. Like his other poems, this poem is simple and traditional in apparent form but complex and profound in meaning. It could be said that, its underlying meaning may never to be exhausted by its readers. The poem is classified as a pastoal. It simply consists of four stanzas with the rhyme scheme of abaab. The diction of this poem is very plain, for ordinary and even colloquial words are used, just like story-telling. This poem is interpreted universally as a representation of two similar choices. In the poem, a man faces two identical forks, which symbolize the choice of fate. They contrast increasingly with each other as they diverge in their separate directions. Man is free to choose, but it's beyond his ability to foretell the consequences. Man can choose a common route which guarantees a safe and reliable life. He can also choose a less common one which is unknown, unique and stands out above other else's. The first stanza is:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
At the beginning of this poem, the poet shows the inability of human beings to foresee the future, especially the results of choices. At the split in the road, the speaker looks far down both the two paths to see what each of the paths will bring. However, his sight is limited; his eyes can only see the path until it bends into "the undergrowth". Both roads diverge into a "yellow wood" and appear to be "about the same" in their purposes. The first path is a more common route. The other is less traveled, which "was grass and wanted wear". The poet presents a conflict here-the decision between the common easy path and exceptional challenging path. People hope to achieve a satisfactory and interesting life on this road. The wish is good, but reality is full of challenges and uncertainties. Nobody can be sure of the outcome. After vacillating between the two roads, the poet finally decides to take the road "less traveled by" and leads a different life from common people.
The Road Not Taken is full of philosophical overtones. In the poem, man's life is metaphorically related to a journey filled with twists and turns. I believe what the poet was implying was that everyone will face diffucult decisions. Some hard and some a little bit easier. The two different paths signify two different kinds of lives. Choosing the common easy path, people will feel at ease and live in safety, because the outcome is predictable. However, that kind of life may be less exciting and lack of novelty. While choosing the "less traveled" road represents the gamble of facing a more difficult path in lives. This forms contrast with familiar lives of most people. Furthermore, he is saying that the road less taken, or harder but possibly much more rewarding route is bound to pay off in the long run. The poem is not only a reflection of Frost's own life, but a deep philosopical depiction of human nature. According to my personal understanding, this poem may indicate his own choice to be a poet. The poet makes up his mind to dedicate himself to poem writing, which is regarded as a less common career. Between the lines the poet keeps trying to imply to us that there is much more than this. What is more, after having made a choice, they always feel regretful and even remorseful for fear that they might have made a wrong choice. After turning this issue over in his mind for minutes, he soothed himself by claiming "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" Nevertheless, immediately after a second thought, he came to realized that it might not be possible, "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back." Once stepping on one road, there might exist no way turning back. Till now, the story-teller seemed to have finished his narration about this past travel and came to the present from the memory about the past. All in all, the poet told us a man must shoulder the result and be responsible for his choice. He can never go back to the past and experience other possibilities. Through The Road Not Taken, the author conveys hisphilosophical thoughts about life's choice. The diverged roads seem identical, they actually lead to different directions, which symbolize different fates. One has to consider a lot before making a wise choice.
Philosophical Thoughts in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is one of Robert Frost's most well-known poems which was published in his collection New Hampshire in 1923. This poem reflects many characteristics of Frost's poems, including the relationship between humans and nature, the attention to natural detail, and the strong theme suggested by individual lines. The poem is of four stanzas with aaba rhyme scheme. The whole poem is:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bell a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely,dark and deep,
But I have promise to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The plot of the poem is a traveler(narrator) by horse on the darkest night of the year, stops to watch a woods filling up with snow. He thinks the owner of the woods is someone who lives in the village and will not see him stopping there. While he is attracted by the beauty of the woods and nature, he is reminded by his little horse and realizes that he has obligations which pull him away from the lure of nature. The speaker describes the beauty and temptation of the woods as "lovely, dark and deep," but reminds himself that he must not remain there, because he has "promises to keep," and a long journey ahead of him. He has to complete his obligations and then make his aspirations to be realized. Many readers over the years have felt that the man's journey in the poem toward sleep represents life's "journey" toward death, though Frost himself insisted that the last two lines were not an invocation of death. Another popular way of reading the poem is to understand the man's rejection of the woods as personal responsibility and an acceptance of social duty (Song Yuankang, 2007:271). It is hard to say what the woods represent for the man-rest, death, nature, beauty, solitude, oblivion-but it is clear that he feels he should not allow himself to give in to his desire to stay there.
The most philosophical part is the last stanza of the poem. The word "But" tells us how he reluctantly gives in, almost surrendering to his fate. Frost could have used the word "yet" as in "Yet I have promises to keep." "Yet" would have at least meant that the man felt that the promises were worth keeping, and that his family was worth all he went through for them. "But" points toward his hopelessness and what he sees as lack of courage to escape the life he despises. In the last two lines, the use of the same line twice feels like a fade out. It emphasizes the central theme: contrast between man and nature. The poem's theme revolves around the tension between the narrator's feelings of obligation and his desire to become lost in the "lovely, dark and deep" woods. His horse seems to sense, to do so would not only mean the breaking of promises but also the endangering of life. He apparently decides to return to the real world and cease his dreaming.
Though Frost writes about a forest or a wildflower, his real subject is humanity. Frost constantly alternates between inner thoughts and descriptions of the world outside. The remoteness of nature reveals the tragedy of man's isolation and his weakness in the face of vast, impersonal forces. But nature also serves to glorify man by showing the superiority of the human consciousness to brute matter. The final two lines express the man's weariness and the unwillingness back to tedious reality that waits for him. Frost regarded nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration but nonetheless fraught with peril. The significant repetition in the last two lines of the final stanza seems it ends with regret, but a sense of hope is implied in those lines. His work shows his strong sympathy for the values of early American society. The temptation the poet traveler faces is to enter the wood and find his rest there, but he realizes it has a long way to go before he can have any physical rest on his journey.
Conlcusion
From what we have analyzed above, we could see that all the Robert Frost's poems are full of meanings and philosophical thoughts. Frost generally presents a balanced relationship between human beings and nature. In both his nature poems and his pastorals, the poet portrays average human experience by projecting it into a world remote and distinct. Frost was a nature poet, but not in the natively romantic sense of a poet who celebrates the beauty or pastral simplicity of nature (Chritophor, 2006:19). Instead, to teach people morals, he uses the rural world as the source of emblems and symbols, creating rich implied phylosophy of life. In contrast to Chinese traditional pastoral poetry, his poems show his positive acceptance rather than evasion of the reality of conflicts. Though his poetry is grounded in the landscapes of New England, it appealed to readers at home and abroad. The influence of Frost and his poetry is very extensive and far-reaching and the phylosophy implied in his poems will be a everlasting topic in literary field of the world.
Bibiliography:
[1]Chritophor, Beach.20世纪美国诗歌[M].重庆:重庆出版社,2006.
[2]Hamilton, Ian,ed. Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994.
[3]常耀信.美国文学简史[M].天津:南开大学出版社,2003. [4]刘守兰.英美名诗解读[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2003.
[5]宋元康.美国文学导读[M].昆明:云南大学出版社,2007.
[6]钱青.美国文学名著精选[M].香港:商务印书馆,1995.
[7]徐新辉.暂时遏制混乱的锐利武器-儒家思想关照下罗伯特弗罗斯特诗歌研[M].广州:暨南大学出版社,2007.
[8]王志林.浅析弗罗斯特的田园诗[J].西南农业大学学报,2009,(4).
关键词:罗伯特·弗罗斯特;哲学思想;田园诗歌
中图分类号:I106 文献标识码:A文章编号:1009-0118(2010)-05-0254-02
Introduction
Robert Lee Frost is one of the most beloved American poets, whose work was made familiar with classrooms and lecture platforms. He was a four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and recognized one of the best American poets of the twentieth century. Frost used a highly colloquial style, avoiding words that would seem unusual or unnatural (Chritophor, 2006:15). His poems are simple at first sight, but demand readers for deep reading to grasp further meaning beyond surface. Most of Frost' s poems were very carefully constructed, yet he made them seem effortless by using colloquial language, conversational rhythms. As a pastoral poet, Frost experienced and traveled a lot. Frost has so often written about the rural landscape and wildlife that one can hardly avoid thinking of him as a nature poet. The poetry of Robert Frost often combined pastoral imagery with solitary philosophical themes. They fully reflect Frost's philosophy and thinking behind the simple and plain lines. He often associated his poems with rural New England. He makes his New England universal in meaning and implication ( Hamilton, 1994). Fullness of philosophical thoughts is the main characteristics of Frost's poems. In our attempt to understand Frost's thoughts and true meaning of his poems, the idea of analyzing the author's philosophical meaning proves useful. To illastrate it and improve the reader's understanding, l set two typical examples of Robert Frost's pastoral poems.
Philosophical Thoughts in The Road Not Taken
The Road Not Taken is one of Frost's most popular poems. Like his other poems, this poem is simple and traditional in apparent form but complex and profound in meaning. It could be said that, its underlying meaning may never to be exhausted by its readers. The poem is classified as a pastoal. It simply consists of four stanzas with the rhyme scheme of abaab. The diction of this poem is very plain, for ordinary and even colloquial words are used, just like story-telling. This poem is interpreted universally as a representation of two similar choices. In the poem, a man faces two identical forks, which symbolize the choice of fate. They contrast increasingly with each other as they diverge in their separate directions. Man is free to choose, but it's beyond his ability to foretell the consequences. Man can choose a common route which guarantees a safe and reliable life. He can also choose a less common one which is unknown, unique and stands out above other else's. The first stanza is:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
At the beginning of this poem, the poet shows the inability of human beings to foresee the future, especially the results of choices. At the split in the road, the speaker looks far down both the two paths to see what each of the paths will bring. However, his sight is limited; his eyes can only see the path until it bends into "the undergrowth". Both roads diverge into a "yellow wood" and appear to be "about the same" in their purposes. The first path is a more common route. The other is less traveled, which "was grass and wanted wear". The poet presents a conflict here-the decision between the common easy path and exceptional challenging path. People hope to achieve a satisfactory and interesting life on this road. The wish is good, but reality is full of challenges and uncertainties. Nobody can be sure of the outcome. After vacillating between the two roads, the poet finally decides to take the road "less traveled by" and leads a different life from common people.
The Road Not Taken is full of philosophical overtones. In the poem, man's life is metaphorically related to a journey filled with twists and turns. I believe what the poet was implying was that everyone will face diffucult decisions. Some hard and some a little bit easier. The two different paths signify two different kinds of lives. Choosing the common easy path, people will feel at ease and live in safety, because the outcome is predictable. However, that kind of life may be less exciting and lack of novelty. While choosing the "less traveled" road represents the gamble of facing a more difficult path in lives. This forms contrast with familiar lives of most people. Furthermore, he is saying that the road less taken, or harder but possibly much more rewarding route is bound to pay off in the long run. The poem is not only a reflection of Frost's own life, but a deep philosopical depiction of human nature. According to my personal understanding, this poem may indicate his own choice to be a poet. The poet makes up his mind to dedicate himself to poem writing, which is regarded as a less common career. Between the lines the poet keeps trying to imply to us that there is much more than this. What is more, after having made a choice, they always feel regretful and even remorseful for fear that they might have made a wrong choice. After turning this issue over in his mind for minutes, he soothed himself by claiming "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" Nevertheless, immediately after a second thought, he came to realized that it might not be possible, "Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back." Once stepping on one road, there might exist no way turning back. Till now, the story-teller seemed to have finished his narration about this past travel and came to the present from the memory about the past. All in all, the poet told us a man must shoulder the result and be responsible for his choice. He can never go back to the past and experience other possibilities. Through The Road Not Taken, the author conveys hisphilosophical thoughts about life's choice. The diverged roads seem identical, they actually lead to different directions, which symbolize different fates. One has to consider a lot before making a wise choice.
Philosophical Thoughts in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is one of Robert Frost's most well-known poems which was published in his collection New Hampshire in 1923. This poem reflects many characteristics of Frost's poems, including the relationship between humans and nature, the attention to natural detail, and the strong theme suggested by individual lines. The poem is of four stanzas with aaba rhyme scheme. The whole poem is:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bell a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely,dark and deep,
But I have promise to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The plot of the poem is a traveler(narrator) by horse on the darkest night of the year, stops to watch a woods filling up with snow. He thinks the owner of the woods is someone who lives in the village and will not see him stopping there. While he is attracted by the beauty of the woods and nature, he is reminded by his little horse and realizes that he has obligations which pull him away from the lure of nature. The speaker describes the beauty and temptation of the woods as "lovely, dark and deep," but reminds himself that he must not remain there, because he has "promises to keep," and a long journey ahead of him. He has to complete his obligations and then make his aspirations to be realized. Many readers over the years have felt that the man's journey in the poem toward sleep represents life's "journey" toward death, though Frost himself insisted that the last two lines were not an invocation of death. Another popular way of reading the poem is to understand the man's rejection of the woods as personal responsibility and an acceptance of social duty (Song Yuankang, 2007:271). It is hard to say what the woods represent for the man-rest, death, nature, beauty, solitude, oblivion-but it is clear that he feels he should not allow himself to give in to his desire to stay there.
The most philosophical part is the last stanza of the poem. The word "But" tells us how he reluctantly gives in, almost surrendering to his fate. Frost could have used the word "yet" as in "Yet I have promises to keep." "Yet" would have at least meant that the man felt that the promises were worth keeping, and that his family was worth all he went through for them. "But" points toward his hopelessness and what he sees as lack of courage to escape the life he despises. In the last two lines, the use of the same line twice feels like a fade out. It emphasizes the central theme: contrast between man and nature. The poem's theme revolves around the tension between the narrator's feelings of obligation and his desire to become lost in the "lovely, dark and deep" woods. His horse seems to sense, to do so would not only mean the breaking of promises but also the endangering of life. He apparently decides to return to the real world and cease his dreaming.
Though Frost writes about a forest or a wildflower, his real subject is humanity. Frost constantly alternates between inner thoughts and descriptions of the world outside. The remoteness of nature reveals the tragedy of man's isolation and his weakness in the face of vast, impersonal forces. But nature also serves to glorify man by showing the superiority of the human consciousness to brute matter. The final two lines express the man's weariness and the unwillingness back to tedious reality that waits for him. Frost regarded nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration but nonetheless fraught with peril. The significant repetition in the last two lines of the final stanza seems it ends with regret, but a sense of hope is implied in those lines. His work shows his strong sympathy for the values of early American society. The temptation the poet traveler faces is to enter the wood and find his rest there, but he realizes it has a long way to go before he can have any physical rest on his journey.
Conlcusion
From what we have analyzed above, we could see that all the Robert Frost's poems are full of meanings and philosophical thoughts. Frost generally presents a balanced relationship between human beings and nature. In both his nature poems and his pastorals, the poet portrays average human experience by projecting it into a world remote and distinct. Frost was a nature poet, but not in the natively romantic sense of a poet who celebrates the beauty or pastral simplicity of nature (Chritophor, 2006:19). Instead, to teach people morals, he uses the rural world as the source of emblems and symbols, creating rich implied phylosophy of life. In contrast to Chinese traditional pastoral poetry, his poems show his positive acceptance rather than evasion of the reality of conflicts. Though his poetry is grounded in the landscapes of New England, it appealed to readers at home and abroad. The influence of Frost and his poetry is very extensive and far-reaching and the phylosophy implied in his poems will be a everlasting topic in literary field of the world.
Bibiliography:
[1]Chritophor, Beach.20世纪美国诗歌[M].重庆:重庆出版社,2006.
[2]Hamilton, Ian,ed. Oxford Companion to 20th-Century Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1994.
[3]常耀信.美国文学简史[M].天津:南开大学出版社,2003. [4]刘守兰.英美名诗解读[M].上海:上海外语教育出版社,2003.
[5]宋元康.美国文学导读[M].昆明:云南大学出版社,2007.
[6]钱青.美国文学名著精选[M].香港:商务印书馆,1995.
[7]徐新辉.暂时遏制混乱的锐利武器-儒家思想关照下罗伯特弗罗斯特诗歌研[M].广州:暨南大学出版社,2007.
[8]王志林.浅析弗罗斯特的田园诗[J].西南农业大学学报,2009,(4).