THE WILDERNESS WITHIN: ROBERT FROST'S, "DESERT PLACES"
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
—from “Desert Places” by Robert Frost
I first studied Robert Frost’s haunting poem “Desert Places” when I was in the tenth grade. Mrs. Cole was my delightful but demanding English teacher. This was the first Robert Frost poem that truly grabbed me. To this day can recite the poem by memory— the last stanza (above) still strikes me as if a stake were driven into my heart.
“Desert Places” is a winter poem written in New England. I live in New Hampshire where Frost also once lived for a time. It is summer here now, yet for some inescapable reason the poem is haunting me enough now that I must write about it.
The poem opens with a deceptively simple winter scene—snow falling on a field at nightfall. By its conclusion, the poem has journeyed from an external landscape to an internal terrain, revealing that the most daunting wilderness lies not in the vast emptiness of space, but within the human heart itself. Sometimes the most fearful discovery we can make is the one we discover about ourselves.
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
Frost begins looking outward at the world around him. The repetition of “falling… fast, oh, fast” creates an urgency, a sense of being overtaken. The landscape is smoothed over, made uniform, and erased. This external transformation mirrors an internal process—the way we often allow the surface of our lives to become covered over, hiding what lies beneath.
That is why we try so hard to fill every hour with some kind of activity—scrolling through our phones, binge-watching television series, surrounding ourselves with constant noise from podcasts, music, or streaming services—anything to avoid being alone without distraction. We will do anything to avoid confronting ourselves as we really are. Like the field in Frost’s poem, we allow our authentic selves to be covered over, smoothed into something more manageable, so that we can put off the encounter with our true selves, with all our faults and wrinkles.
The field has no expression, nothing to say,
And the loneliness includes me unawares.
It’s not just that the external world can feel empty and meaningless—it’s that we ourselves might be empty too. The field becomes a mirror, reflecting our own sense of the void within. Much of modern life is spent running from the encounter with that void. Even our “entertainment” can be a way to flee from ourselves. We look for not just diversion, but something that will numb us to the world around us and keep us from having to face who we really are beneath all our constructed identities and busy schedules.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
Frost acknowledges that this confrontation with emptiness, with our own “desert places,” is not a temporary condition that can be resolved quickly. The loneliness deepens before it lessens. This is why we resist it so fiercely. We intuitively understand that authentic self-examination requires us to sit with discomfort, to remain present to aspects of ourselves we would rather ignore or deny.
When we do venture into these internal desert places—whether through meditation, therapy, journaling, or simply by turning off our devices and sitting quietly—we encounter not just emptiness, but the complexity of our inner lives. We see our unconscious desires, our petty jealousies, our capacity for self-deception, our fears about our inadequacies, and sometimes our casual cruelty to others and ourselves. We glimpse both our potential for growth and our resistance to change.
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to say.
The natural world in Frost’s poem becomes increasingly stark, increasingly silent. Yet this bleakness serves a purpose—it strips away everything extraneous, everything we use to distract ourselves from essential questions: Who are we when no one is watching? What do we truly value? What kind of person are we becoming through our daily choices?
We are afraid of the desert not just because of what we will find out about ourselves, but because of what we need to do differently. Self-knowledge carries responsibility. Once we see our patterns clearly—our tendency to avoid difficult conversations, our habit of judging others to feel better about ourselves, our ways of sleepwalking through our days—we can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost’s final stanza brings us full circle, but with crucial insight. The vast emptiness of space, the ultimate unknowns of existence, pale in comparison to the mystery and potential terror of our own inner landscape. There is something almost defiant in these lines. There is a recognition that while we cannot control the cosmic forces around us, we do have some agency in how we relate to ourselves.
The desert places within us are simply part of the human condition. We all carry these empty spaces within us. The question is whether we will flee from them or learn to inhabit them with courage and curiosity.
Taking the time to experience our internal desert—to sit with our fears, contradictions, and longings without trying to fix or flee from them—is essential for authentic growth. It’s in these stripped-down moments that we discover not just our limitations, but our capacity for change, for compassion, and for becoming more fully ourselves.