“promises oceans deep / But never to keep”
Uncle Jerry identifies the chorus line 'promises oceans deep / But never to keep' as echoing Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' specifically the line 'I have miles to go and promises to keep.' He notes that Peter eventually didn't keep his promises.
Angela & Uncle Jerry discuss Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' as an example of how literary evidence can be selectively used to build an unconventional interpretation. Uncle Jerry references a critical article that argued the poem was about bestiality, an interpretation he calls wrong but 'compelling' in its use of textual evidence. He uses this as a setup for his own deliberately provocative vampirism reading of Maroon, illustrating how cherry-picking lines can lead to readings that belie the holistic work.
“In from the snow”
Angela & Uncle Jerry reference Robert Frost's 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' when discussing the symbolism of snow in ivy. Uncle Jerry uses Frost's poem as an example of how a poet dispels ambiguity by surrounding snow with death imagery, evening, darkness, deep woods like a grave, to establish snow as a death image. He contrasts this with ivy, where the snow remains ambiguous.