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.
Though Robert Frost is well known for many of his poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is just one example of his ability to use sound to create image, image to capture a moment, and a moment to elicit a feeling. It was written, “on a summer morning in 1922. After staying up all night he saw the sunrise and wrote a poem about a snowy evening as if he said, ‘he had seen a hallucination’” (Campbell). Being that this poem is about a wintery scene but was written in summer, the idea that Frost had hallucinated the idea before writing it fits the vivid, yet dream like images it provokes in its readers. It moves us through the narrator's hesitation to leave after taking in the snowy landscape, while then personifying his horse as a method to drive the poem to its conclusion which pushing the narrator to fulfill his obligations.
A common saying is “work before play” which could easily some up
one principal theme in this poem. We could also say then another theme is that we should take a moment every now and again and simply take in our surroundings but not lose sight so easily on our
road ahead. The poem also creates a feeling of longing, given by the narrator to explore the vast white folds of a place that does not belong to him and also of a slight mischief by pausing to
it, in this contemplation. There is also a theme of four in this poem both in image and in verse. Frost wrote it to contain four stanzas, each of which is a quatrain (containing four lines). It
is also written in iambic tetrameter, which means each line contains eight syllables broken into four feet. All of these choices were likely intentional, to both assist with the image of the
four-legged horse as well as the internal brisk pace of the poem. By using a literacy methods to theorize using primarily formalist criticism, but also in small ways, types such as
reader-response and structuralism, we see how its use of sound gives the reader a feeling of this pace, both slowing down and speeding up, affording the poem its overall change in
moods.
The poem starts off with, “Whose woods these are I think I know.”(line 1), which gives us the many ‘s’ and ‘w’ sounds bringing us to slow down with the sounds along with the narrator in his opening mental hesitation, seeking the name of the person whose land they are now crossing. This pattern in sound continues with the second line, “His house is in the village though;”(line 2) where we are given a hint to the land's owner finding out it is a male and that he lives in the village. The ‘s’ sounds continue to slow us down with the end ‘oh’ sound in ‘though.’ Mary Oliver points out, in her analysis of this of poem that, “One can scarcely read these lines in any other than a quiet, musing, almost whispered way.” (Oliver, page 24) The next two lines read “He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.”(lines 3 and 4), which contains an internal rhyme of “will” and “fill.” This may have been done due in part because these two lines do not exclusively rhyme as the first two did to help with the flow/ reading, since he could have easily written it as “can” instead of “will.” The use of “will” gives the readers a hint that the narrator is arguing to himself on why it is ok for him to stand here and admire the woods filling up with snow despite it not being his land since he won’t be seen. The lack of punctuation at the end of line three makes it so these two lines are connected, starting with this excuse of why he won’t be caught for what he continues to write his reason for stopping.
Among the four lines of the first stanza there is a pattern of double letter in, “woods,” “village,” “will,” “see,” “stopping,” “woods,” repeated, followed with the final, “fill.” The use of so many words containing double letters may represent the two minds the narrator has at this point of the poem. This also may be intentional since the words with double letters continues through the rest of the poem with, “little,” “queer,” “between,” “woods,” used for a third time, “harness,” “bells,” “sweep,” a fourth and final use of “woods” (again a pattern of four), “deep,” “keep,” “sleep,” found at the end of both last lines. This double pattern up to this point, is then overemphasized by the repetitions and closure to the poem with the repetitive lines.
In the next stanza, we begin to gain some personification of one of the many strong images in the poem--the horse. It is attributed with being little, as well as the narrator’s projection of potential feelings on why they have stopped in the line “My little horse must think it queer.”(line 5) The second line continues with the reason for the horses’ confusion being that they have done so, so far from a farmhouse with, “To stop without a farmhouse near.”(line 6) The word “stop,” in this line instead of “cease,” “halt,” “pause,” “park” or even, “end” gives connection to the former “s” sounds and ends in a mute which better relays the action. The line flows from that point on, but the use of that word versus another gives the line a halting feeling coupled with a sound that has become prevalent. Next, we are given, “Between the woods and frozen lake,”(line7) which gives a softer “z” sound, which some may argue begins to imply the final idea of sleep. This stanza does not offer any punctuation until the end after the line, “The darkest evening of the year.”(line 8) The “d” sound in “darkest,” may also be a foreshadowing of the “d” sounds found later in the poem with, “sound,” “wind,” “downy,” “dark,” and “deep.”
In the third stanza we begin with, “He gives his harness bells a shake”(line 9) which is rife with the same “s” sounds continuing this feeling of serenity matching the scene until we hit the “k” in shake, again the use of the word applying the action. The sound of the bells, the sound of the “k” within the word and the meaning of the word all works together to break us away. This sound is again repeated in the next line of, “To ask if there is some mistake.”(line 10) in “ask” and “mistake,” though only for a moment. This is the moment when the horse tries to snap the narrator back to reality but he just as quickly drifts back into it with the line, “The only other sound’s the sweep.”(line 11)
Again, the “s” returns in “sound’s” and “sweep”, carrying us back to this quiet moment the narrator is enjoying, looking over his snowy surroundings. By lacking punctuations, we move accordingly, sweeping into the last line. To finish this stanza, “Of easy wind and downy flake.”(line 12) which uses the word downy to demonstrate how soft and fluffy the flakes of snow seem. The “d” in downy has three effects within this poem here. First, it duplicates the “d” in “darkest” we saw in the previous stanza. Second, it also foreshadows both the impactful words found in the next line of “dark and deep.” And finally, it can be imagery that we can correlate to that of a pillow, which makes it flawless in Frost’s intentional use of the word, then becoming the new need the narrator has developed, that of a want to sleep, which we hear clearly in the final two lines. There is also a repetition of “w” in “wind” and the more silent one in “downy” within this line along with that of the line before having it in “sweep” and the one in the next line of “woods,” nicely tying it all together. This sound sensationalizes with the “s” sounds, to call to us with the common whispers wind can create.
The last stanza has one of the most rhythm driven lines in the poem, being the first with, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”(line 13) Frost’s use of punctuation in the middle of this line, being the only line to have one, slows down its reading tremendously. We can fully grasp within this moment the narrator's complete love of what he is witnessing, taking that extra-long pause to take it in. We can get the sensation that if it were not for his need to move on, both for his horse and for his unknown obligation that we discover in the next line, he may well have stayed longer. The heavy sounds of “dark and deep,” may also be used to indicate the heavy sleep he also longs for, and the heavy pace he must continue. We also have a repeat of the word “dark” just as we had been given from the last line of the second stanza, before the break in the narrator's slight meditation with the sound of the bells. Almost as promised with that repetition of “dark,” beginning on the next line, we are snapped back again with sound with the intrusive “B” in “But” being much harder an opener then we have had in most of the previous lines. The line reads, “But I have promises to keep,”(line 14) in which we again get a “k” as from before in the third stanza with “shake,” “ask,” “mistake,” and “flake.” Since the word begins with the “k” instead of ends with it, we may be able to interpret it as his need to move on is greater than his ability to stay. All the lines in this stanza also end in pauses with its punctuation of three commas and one period, possibly providing us with the slow pickup of pace he has when moving on. Our third and fourth lines read the same, “And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.”(lines 15 and 16) These lines give the narrator's final lament of his leaving. They also contain the common alliteration of the “s” sounds but also the new “b” in the two “befores” which may again continue the pickup in pace by their usage. You can almost hear as the horse's head bows down to pull them on.
So much is going on within this poem, I can scarcely reach it all. Between the connections of word choice, to sound effects of alliteration, to internal patterns of structure and symbolism, this poem is so richly complex my contemplations of it can’t compare to its depth of meaning to me. The rhyme scheme is aaba bbcb ccdc dddd. This pattern seems to fit creating that second to pause, to see with that break in the pattern of four before the flow continues within each stanza. It is profoundly “lovely,” this painting Frost creates for us in this work. Frost also illustrates his talents of doing this in some of his other works such as “An Old Man’s Winter Night” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” All of these poems this one included, may well have an arching theme of youth followed by the eventual age many of us will pass through or at least a focus on one or the other. If found in this one, we can see it with the possible subtle hint of mischief in this first stanza, followed later with the narrator's indication of being tired, commonly both adjectives being associated with youth and age. Even a well-known poet such as Mary Oliver marvels at Frost’s ability to craft such a piece that relies so heavily on sound when she says,
Frost kept no jottings about sound while he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” He did not need to. He was a master poet. The poem is an extraordinary statement of human ambivalence and resolution. Genius wrote it. But more than one technical device assisted, the first of which is an extraordinary use of sound. (Oliver, Page 28)
Though Frost may have found these words through a “hallucination,” the emotions it elicits within many of its readers, through his mastery of sound to create the images, surely are not.
Work Cited
Campbell, James Colin. “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening.” YouTube, YouTube, 21 Apr. 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=41&v=hfOxdZfo0gs. Accessed 9 Sept. 2017.
Oliver, Mary. A Poetry Handbook. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.