ESSAY: SOME THOUGHTS ON "STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING" BY ROBERT FROST

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near   

Between the woods and frozen lake   

The darkest evening of the year.   

He gives his harness bells a shake   

To ask if there is some mistake.   

The only other sound’s the sweep   

Of easy wind and downy flake.   

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   

But I have promises to keep,   

And miles to go before I sleep,   

And miles to go before I sleep.

OF COURSE THIS IS ONE OF FROST'S MOST FAMOUS POEMS, first published in 1923. It's the kind of poem that would be well-suited as a Christmas card greeting, with a pretty picture of a horse and carriage beside a snowy wood as its front piece. It's a very gentle, comforting picture. But, as with many of Frost's poems, there are incongruities, images or silences that elicit questions from the reader as they attempt to gain some understanding of what he is talking about.

      My own take is that he is talking about death. More specifically, he is talking about how we understand death, or view it, or approach it to gain a clearer picture of what it looks like. But we can never ‘understand’ death—we can only come close to it, stopping by it for a time on our way through life. We are drawn to it for the simple fact that it lies ahead for all of us. It is always there at the end, our end. For most of our lives, we get only so close until something reminds us of life and living, or we remember how much we have left to do yet. And though we might not know exactly the 'provenance' of death, or who ‘owns’ it, or what lay beyond, we know it's there, silent and alluring,  beckoning to us from the dark wood that is forever filling up with snow.

      I am by no means an expert in analyzing poetry, but one thing I’ve found helpful is to ask plenty of questions when you’re reading something that has a more complex, denser, tangential form of expression, like a poem. One question that occurred to me is about the title: Why is it “stopping” by the woods, and not stopped? The title reminds me of something an art curator might put as a label for a painting on display, and the idea of stillness, or still-life came to mind.

     There is very little movement (or for that matter, sound) in the poem. We are told by the speaker there is the sound of the wind and the blowing snow, and of course, there is the sound of harness bells as the horse shakes its head in what the speaker tells us is the animal ‘asking’ why they’ve stopped. But nothing else seems to move. So, the title “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” and the general atmosphere of stillness in the poem are at odds with each other, in a way. What is Frost suggesting? (Hint: we are 'forever stopping' at death; we will never reach it while we are alive. To stop by the woods is to be dead. Period.) So, do we just ignore the title, or do we keep it in mind as we ‘follow the play’ of the poem?

     As with many of the speakers in Frost’s poems, they are not ‘omniscient’, in the sense that they, too, have questions; they sometimes don’t know where they are exactly, or why or how they arrived at their destination. They’re ‘imperfect’, and as such, are unreliable. We can’t always take them at their word; they’re like us—at times confused, unsure and fallible. Our speaker doesn’t know, for sure, who owns the woods he is stopping by, and he seems to be there surreptitiously. Why the need for caution? And why does he need permission? And if he knows which house the woods' owner lives in, why doesn’t he know his name? And it is interesting that Frost opens his poem with the speaker concerned over who it is exactly that owns the woods. Why is this significant? The beginnings of poems are important, as are their endings.

     I don’t think I am going to go into detail, analyzing the poem line by line; I’ll just raise some questions for you to consider, and put in my two cents worth. For example, could the “house in the village”, in fact, be a church? God’s house? If so, does the speaker not know his god anymore?  Does he feel he is so far away that his god no longer sees him? He is in a lonely place, indeed.

     The woods “fill up” with snow. What does the snow represent, and what about the surrounding lands?

     It is interesting that the speaker assumes his horse is ‘puzzled’ about why they’ve stopped. Question: Why should the horse think it “queer”, or, for that matter, have such thoughts at all? Horses don’t think like human beings, do they? Does this anthropomorphizing of the horse suggest it is the speaker who feels a sense of unease, but won’t admit it? (I think so.) And why does he not admit his unease? If being near the woods is discomfiting to him, why go there in the first place? Is he drawn there because he, himself, feels near to death for some reason?

     And, for you meteorologists out there—just what exactly does Frost’s speaker mean by the “darkest” evening of the year? Is the speaker referring to the actual darkness of the night, or to the time of year, or a particular date such as the winter solstice (the longest night of the year, not necessarily the darkest), or perhaps the speaker is referring to a ‘dark night of the soul’? If the latter, then that’s something else the speaker does not admit openly, and instead ascribes to his "little horse" (It's  such a tender appellation, don't you think? Childlike and innocent, and full of caring. Perhaps his horse is more important to him than he realizes.)

     My favorite lines in the poem are, “The only other sound’s the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake.” Frost’s sweet use of the alliterative “s” sound conjures up (yes, like magic!) the friction of softly blowing snow through the air or along the snow covered ground. The speaker knows the woods are beautiful and darkly attractive, but is called away by “promises” (more than one) that must be kept. What promises? Made to whom?

     Note that Frost’s aaba, ccdc, eefe, rhyme scheme is broken in the final stanza by a gggg rhyme. How come? And was it a mistake, or did he run out of words to rhyme with at the end, because his last two lines repeat?  I think both the rhyme scheme and the repetition of the last two lines fit thematically with Frost’s idea of death being attractive--as our ultimate source of peace--but at the same time, this attraction toward death has its counterweight in the great pull of life and living. Both dying and living are part of the human experience. They are inseparable and inevitable; hence Frost’s joins together these two oppositions in the final stanza where all four lines rhyme. That the speaker says he has “…miles to go before he sleeps” twice suggests this is all there is for the living: to travel the miles of life until the end. What comes after is simply unknown. That’s my two cents, anyway.

[I took a Robert Frost course at university sometime during the last ice age, and the prof there summed up (just a little too glibly) Frost's work as "looking for god in a godless universe." Sometimes, there does seem to be a vast emptiness above and unanswerable questions below in his poems. But down here there is also life.]

     Anyway, these are some questions to ask and answer that might help to clarify this wonderful poem. It’s deceptive simple; it has a darkness in it, but at the same time, hope. 

     Frost was once interviewed, and was asked if his poem was about death. He said "No".  (As if I’d trust him!)

[Poetry geek memo: Frost wrote it in the summer of 1922, having stayed up all night, in what he called a “hallucinatory” state of mind.]

Frost reading his poem: