Trevor Clayton

Rhetorical Analysis

 

I read the Poetic Structure in Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening". It was very well stated and structured. It talked about how the entire poem was about suicide, but the author did not realize what he was writing about until the poem was further analyzed. The article had an intro, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Each body paragraph talked about a piece of the poem. It had a lot of commentary, but only had one concrete detail to each body paragraph. The first one analyzed how the author of the poem didn’t use punctuation in some of his sentences. The second body paragraph talked about how he put emphasizes on pronouns. The third one was about how he switched from iambic feet to pyrrhic feet throughout the article.  This essay never gave me any surprises it stuck to a format of having one concrete detail in every paragraph and then having commentary to follow it.

 

            The article, Poetic Structure in Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" ended up surprising me on how the meaning was switched around. The author never knew that he was writing about suicide. That to me is astonishing that someone is able to write an entire poem without realizes the true meaning of the poem. Sure he started the poem with a theme in mind, but some where in the poem he lost himself and started writing about something new. I thought that the poem was going to be about trees, nature and enjoying life, but no it was about suicide. It was a shock to me how it just changed dramatically. The way the article was formed was not a surprise though because he followed the same thing that he started as in the first body paragraph.

 

            The article is just about analyzing weither the poem was about suicide or was the narrator is simply looking over the scenery. We will never know, we can only base what we know off of our own studies or off of what other people have researched on the making of this confusing poem. Confusing is a good word to desribe what the article was about, because it states at the beginning about not knowing which way the author was leaning; either suicide or just checking out the scenery.  The author, Robert Frost, never clearly stated which side he was on. This made his article weak, this article was not necessarily made for the reason of persuading people, but you should always be on a clear side. Not being on a side can make you look weak or indecisive.

 

            I think that this article was overall very well written, Robert Frost stayed with the format he started with in the beginning and made rock solid  conrete details supported by tons of commentary. The only weakness would be that he didn’t ever pick whether the poem was made with the theme of suicide in mind or was the narrator is simply looking over the scenery…