Stopping By the Jungle on a Snowy Evening
by Richard T. Morris
Illustrated by Julie Rowan-Zoch
A Caitlain Dlouhy Book
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
2025
40 pages
ISBN: 9781482478021
This clever redux of Robert Frost's "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" is witty, irreverent, and entertaining.
Frost's famous poem is set in a snowy wood on the "darkest evening of the year." In the poem, the narrator describes the setting as having "easy wind" and "downy flake" and the "woods are lovely, dark and deep." He halts his horse to watch the snow fall, enjoying the silence and darkness.
A young boy reimagines the poem. He sees the woods, but his ride is a hippopotamus with a jingle bell collar. Robert Frost appears at a window, correcting the boy, telling him it's not a hippo, it is in fact supposed to be a horse. The boy, not convinced, asks the man who he is. Frost defends his poem, "I wrote this poem." The boy says he only sees his hippo, no horse at all, and changes Frost's work to a jungle setting. Frost disagrees, saying it does not snow in the jungle. As Frost continues to pontificate, the boy says it's boring, so boring that the hippo has fallen asleep. The boy continues to add fun to the poem with a giant snake, a hippo that does karate, an incoming meteor, a tidal wave, and an alien invasion.
The surprise ending uses lines from another Frost poem and ties the new poem and its exciting story together. The Frost character ends up loving the redux and riding off with the boy atop the blue hippo.
At the beginning of the book, you can almost hear the disdain in Frost's voice as he points his finger and "schools" the young boy. When he says he wrote the poem, the word "wrote" is in bold font, directing the reader to give more emphasis, or inflection, to this word. Frost carries a notebook and pen, further showing him as a man of learning. He pulls out a podium to recite the last stanza of his poem, emphasizing the fact he is a writer/poet who recites his poems in the public. He's soon interrupted when the aliens show up and he must hop on the rhino with the boy as the boy shouts, "Run for your lives!"
This fun interpretation includes the original poem after the story. For younger kids, read the poem after the story. For older children, read the poem first so that they have a starting point. The humor will make much more sense if they are familiar with the poem. This is a great conversation opener for a unit on modern poetry (by modern, I am including the twentieth century to the present).
Highly, highly recommended ages 3 and up. It would be a fun creative writing lesson to have students choose a famous poem and rewrite it to "jazz it up a bit." Who knows? Maybe their outcome becomes a picture book!
