Robert Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

One of the marks of great art is that you can never come to an end of appreciating it.  It stands before you, remarkably itself, as if it possessed a human soul, and perhaps, in a way, it does; or rather, a human soul has poured itself into the work, and you can no more learn it all the way through than you can know a human being all the way through.  And perhaps the greatest works of art are those that themselves address an infinite mystery, whether of God, or of man, or of the created world.  Even the world we too often tend to reduce to matter, to what we can measure and quantify, infinitely overflows those bounds, and though a scientist may know more things about the snow, the woods, a frozen lake, and a horse that isn’t fond of the chilly night, that doesn’t mean that he knows those things better than the artist does, or that he even knows them at all.  Maybe he does, and maybe he doesn’t.

Frost’s poem about the snowy woods is meant to be mysterious, and the mystery doesn’t have t…