News at Eleven: That's [Robert] Frost's usual poetic

sleight of hand--his usual front of "positive sensibility." "If he was indeed 'out for stars,'" [Joseph] Brodsky asks, "why didn't he mention that before?" Almost certainly, he's standing at the edge of the woods in the first place because part of him wants to be there--to "make a meal" of his own "dreadful apprehension." The poet has invited himself, in short, to the edge of the woods, and, once there, he is trying to quell his own impulses; he is "shielding himself from his own insights." "The twenty lines of the poem," Brodsky concludes, "constitute the title's translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression 'come in' means 'die.'"

from The New Yorker: Robert Frost: Darkness or Light?

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