Se Ofendendo: Some Thoughts on Suicide from Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

It must be se ofendendo. It cannot be else. - Hamlet, Act V/Scene 1

Gravedigger Number One, like a lot of preachers who like to spout about "the original Greek," has heard just enough Latin to be dangerous. His job involves hanging around at inquests and such waiting to be told where to stow the corpse but he mistakenly believes this amounts to a formal education in the law. So in discussing the death of Ophelia, he garbles his terms: One person could legally kill another se defendendo, in self-defense. But the goodman delver coins a new term, "self-offense." The irony, of course, is that he's probably blundered onto the truth: Hamlet's erstwhile love interest seems to have committed suicide.

That idea brings me to Robert Frost's little poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Bob Dylan dubs Archibald MacLeish, Carl Sandburg, and Robert Frost "the Yeats, Browning and Shelley of the New World." I've heard people call Dylan the American Keats, so who knows? What I do know is that Frost's poems are always about simple farming matters, and yet never about simple farming matters. Dylan tags Frost as "the poet of dark meditations," and I'm with him on that.

"Woods" is a case in point of both these things: everyday incidents as windows to deeper truths, and crepuscular ponderings. To begin with, let's put the poem in front of us:

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.

The 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 bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind on downy flake.

The woods are beautiful, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Simple enough, yes? A benighted traveler pauses to take in the snowscape before moving on with whatever errand sent him into the forest in the first place. But clearly there is much more at work here.

Structurally the most important thing about the poem is the "chain rhyme," where the first, second, and final lines of each stanza rhyme, while the third ends in a different sound, which in turn becomes the rhyming sound for the next stanza. Then notice what happens at the end: All four lines conform to the rhyming sound of the previous stanza and the last two lines repeat. Thus Frost's structure pulls the reader through the poem, refusing, like "the little horse" (we'll get to him in a minute) to let us linger too long at any one point. Then the repeating lines sew the whole thing up neatly, like the feeling of throwing the car into park as our tires crunch on the gravel of our driveway at home.

Now ponder the imagery for a moment: Someone owns the woods, though he goes unnamed and we don't ever meet him. "His house is in the village," and he isn't watching at the moment. (Note: Frost hints at the subtle difference between getting away with something and actually having permission to do it.) Observe also that of the three masculine singular pronouns that designate this Someone, two come at the beginning of lines and are thus capitalized. Can you think of Someone who 1) owns nature and 2) often goes by a capitalized third-person masculine pronoun?

We're talking about God here, but a specific understanding of God: The one "whose house is in the village," the God who lives in the church building amidst the tamed right-angles of avenues and boulevards and the illumination of street lamps. This God owns nature but acts as an absentee landlord who doesn't even keep an eye on the place, let alone occupy it. All of this, don't forget, on "the darkest evening of the year," the Winter Solstice when, in many ancient religions, the sun god was dying and had to be revived by the rituals his followers carried out in the temple.

So the narrator stares into the cold but beautiful void where God is but isn't. On the literal level, if he stays there too long he will freeze to death. But that is, by all accounts, a consummation devoutly to be wished: One grows warm and sleepy and simply slips away. As J. R. R. Tolkien's character Frodo lies snowbound on the slopes of Caradhras, "a great sleepiness came over (him); he felt himself sinking fast into a warm and hazy dream. He thought a fire was heating his toes. . . ."

Not suicide, exactly, in either example. More of a sort of letting go and giving in. Still, that may be only a passive, and thus worse, form of the same despair. It reminds me of Nathaniel Hawthorne's depiction of the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale staggering through the same sort of primeval New England forest as Frost's narrator:

"There was a listlessness in his gait; as if he saw no reason for taking one step farther, nor felt any desire to do so but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive, for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished or avoided."

Been there? No? Good for you. But let not him that girdeth on his harness boast like him that taketh it off. I personally remember, one Saturday afternoon, slumping on the sidewalk, my back to the side wall of a Barnes & Noble, trying to think of a good reason ever to get up again. The woods are beautiful but also dark - they offer obscurity - and deep - they offer seclusion. The grave's a fine and private place. The narrator has, indeed, stopped for death, and half-hopes that death might meet him halfway.

And then the little horse trots to the rescue. Notice that this modest equine occupies two of the four stanzas, and the central ones at that. Its presence anchors the more metaphysical issues on either side. The beast is the body: Francis of Assisi called the body Brother Ass. C. S. Lewis finds this metaphor appropriate, since each of them is "a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast. . . .both pathetically absurd and beautiful." Brother Ass, or at any rate Brother Pony, speaks here for the flesh. Horses do not, Swift's houyhnhnms to one side, go in for metaphysics. The animal is cold and hungry and, I suspect, bothered by this interruption in its well-worn routine. The jangling harness bells could stand for things like hunger pains, sore muscles, and engrained habits that bring us back to the humble goodness of being embodied.

They do, at any rate, awaken the speaker to his "promises to keep," a recollection which in the end proves decisive. I can see him sigh, take the reins, whip up the little pony and roll, snow crunching beneath his wheels, toward what lies ahead.

As a meditation on overcoming the seduction of death the poem is not idle. According to the Centers for Disease Control suicide outranks automobile accidents as a cause of death. It beats homicide: We kill ourselves more often than we kill each other. As the Baby Boom generation grays, suicide, normally the province of teens and seniors, has spiked among the middle aged.

Frost's poem offers nothing in the way of religious reasons against suicide. The Everlasting may, as Hamlet declares, have fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter, but in the God-haunted but God-abandoned wood of modernity, this doesn't count for much. The ultimate reasons are the immediate demands of one's flesh and the web of relationships, the "promises to keep," which tie us to the community of the living. Ultimately inadequate reasons, perhaps, but good enough to be getting on with.

Interestingly enough, G. K. Chesterton offers something like the same argument against se ofendendo. "Suicide," he explains, "is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life." The suicide sneers not only at himself, but the innocent little horse, the wood, the lake, and the village. 

This is good to remember on those days when God seems distant. (God is not, in fact, and while  for many of us our faith tells us this truth, the history of the faithful, starting with Our Lord, tells us it will often feel that way.) Sometimes the jangling bells of our needy bodies and the linked rhyme of the next small task are all that pulls us forward into life's poem until, at last, the great Poet wraps up the final stanza with the kept promise that will ring through eternity.