Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” is a sixteen-line poem consisting of four stanzas; each stanza is four lines each. Most of the lines consist of ten syllables, and in many of these lines the meter or “beat” is “iambic,” in which the odd syllables are unstressed and the even syllables are stressed. Stanzas two and three, for instance, are entirely iambic in rhythm, as in the first sentence of stanza two: “The woods around it have it—it is theirs.” Everything said so far about the poem might therefore make it sound entirely typical of much poetry in English, which often uses iambic rhythm and in which stanzas of four lines (quatrains) are not at all unusual.
However, one aspect of Frost’s poem is quite unusual indeed: its peculiar rhyme scheme. Many poets would have used couplets in four-line stanzas, so that the stanzas would rhyme as follows: a/a/b/b. Another common way to rhyme four-line stanzas would be as follows: a/b/a/b. Frost, however, chooses a pattern that is altogether uncommon: a/a/b/a c/c/d/c e/e/f/e g/g/h/g. Frost’s decision to experiment in this way with rhyme is typical of his interest in the formal, technical aspects of poetry. Frost once compared poetry lacking predictable rhythm and a regular rhyme scheme (often called “free verse”) to playing tennis without a net. In this poem, by forcing himself to find three identical rhyming sounds (instead of just two) for each stanza, Frost slightly raises the net and makes the game a bit more challenging for himself. It is also possible that Frost wanted an isolated, unrhymed word in each stanza as a way of subtly emphasizing one of the poem’s key themes—the theme of loneliness or isolation.
Stanza one opens with the speaker describing the rapid descent of snow and of the darkness of night. The speaker looked into a field as he was passing by and saw...
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