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Subject

English Language Arts (NYS P-12 Common Core)

First Poem

Good-bye, and Keep Cold

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark
And cold to an orchard so young in the bark
Reminds me of all that can happen to harm
An orchard away at the end of the farm
All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.
I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,
I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse
By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.
(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call
I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall
And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)
I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.
(We made it secure against being, I hope,
By setting it out on a northerly slope.)
No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.
'How often already you've had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.
Dread fifty above more than fifty below.'
I have to be gone for a season or so.
My business awhile is with different trees,
Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,
And such as is done to their wood with an axe--
Maples and birches and tamaracks.
I wish I could promise to lie in the night
And think of an orchard's arboreal plight
When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)
Its heart sinks lower under the sod.
But something has to be left to God

CLASS DISCUSSION - PROMPT QUESTIONS:

• What are your first reactions to the title of the poem?
  • Who did you think the poem was being written to before you read it?
  • How did you feel when you learned what Frost was speaking to? What else might he have been speaking to?
• How do you first think Frost feels about this goodbye (up to line 5)?
  • How do you first feel when you know you have to say good-bye to something or someone for a long period of time?
  • What is the significance of the orchard being 'cut off by a hill from the house' (line 5)?
  • What types of things can come between us and another person in a relationship like the hill does between the speaker and the orchard?
• Why doesn't the speaker want the animals in the orchard?
  • How old do you think the orchard is?
  • How does this affect how the speaker feels about the orchard?
  • What bearing does time have on our relationships with those people/things that we care about?
• What does the speaker imply when he says he would warn the animals away with a 'stick for a gun' (line 11)?
  • What does it say about he feels about the life of the animals?
  • Why is this important about what the speaker is trying to say about the quality of life and the importance of the orchard to him?
• What do you learn about apple orchard care-taking in lines 12-16?
  • How does the speaker treat the orchard when speaking to it (lines 17-19)?
  • In what type of relationships do people speak to each other in this way? Why?
• What time of the year does the speaker indicate it is?
  • How does the speaker seem to feel about this?
  • Whose apple orchard is this?
  • How does he feel about attending to the other trees (line 21)? How do you know?
  • Can you relate to the speaker's circumstance?
  • How do you feel whey you have an obligation to do something that you prefer not to? What types of things are these?
• What is it that is to be done to the other trees (lines 23-24)? For what purpose?
  • What is so different about these tress and the apple trees? In care? In significance? In utility?
  • How do we treat differently those things that do not intrigue us as much as others? Why?
• Why doesn't the speaker promise to think about the orchard at night? What else might he be doing?
  • How does distance affect our relationships?
  • What can you do to ease the distance? What could the speaker do?
• What do you think “arboreal” (line 26) means?
  • How do you feel when you are out of touch with a friend for a while?
  • Are the speaker and the orchard friends?
  • What does is mean to be friends?
• What significance does the fact that the speaker gives the orchard a heart (line 28) has on the poem?
  • Whose heart do you think the speaker was thinking of when he gave it to the orchard?
  • How does it make you feel to think that the orchard has a heart?
  • What does it do for you to think of everything around us as having a heart? How do/should you treat things that have a heart? Things that don't? Is there a difference? Why/why not?
• How does the speaker resolve the fact that he has to leave (line 29)?
  • What is Frost saying about nature by leaving it to God?
  • What is he saying about the way life can be?
  • Can you think of any situations that you have to leave to be taken care of by somebody else?
  • What does this say about man and nature? Man and man? In what ways do we need each other? Why?
  • Can you think of any situations going on in the world today that can relate to the way speaker feels?

Second Poem

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

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 bells 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 promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

CLASS DISCUSSION - PROMPT QUESTIONS

On the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening. He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or she can rest for the night.

• In both "Good-bye and Keep Cold" and “Stopping by Woods” the speaker hesitates en route. Compare these hesitations.
  • Do they derive from the same impulse and misgiving or are they distinct about leaving the quietness, loneliness of the orchard/wood?
• In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," Frost writes that the speaker imagines his horse to think him strange. What might be the significance of this?
• The basic conflict in the poem, resolved in the last stanza, is between an attraction toward the woods and the pull of responsibility outside of the woods.
  • What do woods represent? Something good? Something bad?
  • Woods are sometimes a symbol for wildness, madness, the pre-rational, the looming irrational. But why do these woods do not seem particularly wild? (They are someone's woods, someone's in particular--the owner lives in the village. But that owner is in the village on this, the darkest evening of the year--so would any sensible person be.)
• What is the division between the village (or "society," "civilization," "duty," "sensibility," "responsibility") and the woods (that which is beyond the borders of the village and all it represents)?
  • If the woods are not particularly wicked, they still possess the seed of the irrational; and they are, at night, dark--with all the varied connotations of darkness.
• Part of what is irrational about the woods is their attraction. They are restful, seductive, lovely, dark, and deep--like deep sleep, like oblivion. Snow falls in downy flakes, like a blanket to lie under and be covered by. And here is where many readers hear dark undertones to this lyric. To rest too long while snow falls could be to lose one's way, to lose the path, to freeze and die. Does this poem express a wish to be lost, considered, and then discarded?
  • Do the woods sing a siren's song? To be lulled to sleep could be truly dangerous. Is allowing oneself to be lulled akin to giving up the struggle of prudence and self-preservation?
  • Or does the poem merely describe the temptation to sit and watch beauty while responsibilities are forgotten--to succumb to a mood for a while?
• Why is the final line repeated? The line "And miles to go before I sleep" need not imply burden alone; perhaps the ride home will be lovely, too.

Duration

Two 45-minute classes

Procedure

1. Introduce activity and objectives
2. Distribution of poems
3. Oral reading of the first poem
4. Class overview of the poem's form, punctuation, and reading
5. Class discussion - prompt questions
6. Oral reading of the second poem
7. Class overview of the poem's form, punctuation, and reading
8. Class discussion - prompt questions

Materials

• Poem copies
• Bonus: Hard cover 2001 edition of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost and illustrated by Susan Jeffers. Utilize this book as an enhancement visual to Frost's poem.

Optional Handouts:

First Poem and Questions - Word

First Poem and Questions - PDF

Second Poem and Questions - Word

Second Poem and Questions - PDF

Description

In this activity, students will compare two poems by Robert Frost, "Good-bye and Keep Cold" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Included below are the two poems and class discussion/prompt questions to guide the students with their analysis.

OBJECTIVES:

1. Students will listen to the reading of the poem for clarity of punctuation as they follow their copy.
2. Students will be acquainted with Frost's relationship with nature and how it is directly related to human relationships.
3. Students will learn how they view the poem differently through class discussion, and see that different readers have individual ideas that are no less in meaning or wrong in context (whole language enforcement).

Essential Question

How can different poems of different formats possess similar themes?

Assessment

Students will be able to discuss the poems through guided questions.

Related Academic Standards

New York State

9-10R9 Choose and develop criteria in order to evaluate the quality of texts. Make connections to other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, and personal experiences. (RI&RL)

11-12R6 Analyze how authors employ point of view, perspective, and purpose, to shape explicit and implicit messages (e.g., persuasiveness, aesthetic quality, satire, sarcasm, irony, or understatement). (RI&RL)

11-12R7 

• In literary texts, analyze multiple adaptations of a source text as presented in different formats (e.g., works of art, graphic novels, music, film, etc.), specifically evaluating how each version interprets the source. (RL)
• In informational texts, integrate and evaluate sources on the same topic or argument in order to address a question, or solve a problem. (RI)

11-12R9 Choose and develop criteria in order to evaluate the quality of texts. Make connections to other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, and personal experiences. (RI&RL)

RL.9-10.11 Interpret, analyze, and evaluate narratives, poetry, and drama, aesthetically and ethically by making connections to: other texts, ideas, cultural perspectives, eras, personal events and situations.

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