​​​​The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

A random collection of books inhabits a shelf above my home office desk. “Toothpicks &  Logos” by John Hesket sits binding-to-binding with “How to Work a Room” by Susan RoAne and “Million Billion” by Michael Perry. Perhaps the most unexpected is a thin tome entitled  simply “Frost.” It is a collection of poems by Robert Frost my godparents gifted me a few weeks after my 9-year-old self had impressed them at a family gathering by reciting Frost’s poem, “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” from memory. 

I am not a great lover of poetry. Indeed, that Frost book is the only book of poetry in my possession and, oddly, “Stopping By Woods” is NOT included in it. Still, remarkably and  inexplicably, I can repeat that poem word for word, some 50-plus years after I learned it.   

I went to a Catholic elementary school, so you might assume if we were required to memorize anything, it would have been some essential Bible verse, John 3:16-17, perhaps. But my fourth-grade teacher, Miss Gillig, apparently preferred Frost to the Apostles. Looking back at it, “Stopping By Woods” is a relatively tricky piece for a 9-year-old to digest. If you had asked  me, at that age, what the poem was about, I would have said a man riding a horse-drawn carriage through the woods who stops for a moment to admire the beauty of it and then continues on his way. And maybe that’s all it really is about. But in college, “Stopping By Woods” made a return appearance as the subject of an assignment on literary criticism. The professor invited us to take a deeper dive into the work. 

Most scholars see the poem as involving death and our ways of coping with or accepting it. That initially seems like a very dark interpretation of what appears on the surface to be a  comfortable, cozy bit of writing, but when you look more closely at the language, it all fits. “The darkest evening of the year” could refer to the winter solstice, simply placing the poem sometime around Christmas, or it could allude to a darkness of the soul. Most of us aren’t  fixated on death. Perhaps like the poem’s narrator, however, we occasionally stop to consider the idea, then move on and go about living our lives. “And miles to go before I sleep.”

This past weekend, I was working at my mountain property and made the short drive to visit a member of my church who owns a vineyard nearby. A few years back, she and her husband  bought some land and planted 1,500 grape vines, intending to split their time between their suburban Charlotte home and their hobby vineyard. Tragically, her husband passed away shortly after the vines were planted, but she has kept the vineyard going as a tribute to their shared dream.  

As we stood there looking over the acres of gnarled, winter-bare vines, I thought about the massive effort that must have gone into creating something so vast and wonderful and how the husband never got to enjoy the literal and figurative fruits of his labors. As if reading my mind, the woman turned to me and said, “Whatever it is you want to do with your land up here, don’t wait. You’ll always find a reason to work a year longer, to put more money in the bank, to hold out for Medicare, to add another notch to your list of career accomplishments. But in the end, none of that matters.” Maybe that’s the message I’ve carried with me all those years in iambic verse; perhaps that’s the true confluence of things. 

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening 

By Robert Frost 

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.