Showing posts with label Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Show all posts

Thursday, March 24, 2016

Fly These Wings' "Dark Eyes"

This morning I listened to Fly These Wings' "Dark Eyes."  [Fly These Wings is a band my cousin was in, so I'm not sure how wide an audience this post will have.]  I noticed that it seems to have been inspired by Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," which - fortuitously - I just happened to have read this morning (I doubt I would have noticed the similarities otherwise).

The last verse shows Frost's influence the most clearly:
The woods are lovely, oh, so scary, dark and deep
But we've got promises, yeah, I've got promises to keep
The woods are scary, oh, so lovely, dark and deep
But I've got promises, yeah, I've got promises to keep
The first two lines of the last stanza of Frost's poem are:
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep
Once I found that very obvious similarity, I found a few other phrases in the lyrics that betray Frost's influence.  In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," the narrator's horse "gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake."  "Mistake" is also a line-ending word (although not a rhyming one) in "Dark Eyes" - "Yeah, it makes me wonder, makes me wonder if there’s some mistake."

There are also a few lines in "Dark Eyes" that allude to the final repeated line in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  "While we've got many folks we have to meet before you sleep" and "But we've got many miles before we win the human race" expand Frost's "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep."