Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', like many of Frost's poems can be read on many different levels. The surface meaning is often a wonderfully evocative scene of nature with many deeper sublevels. In this poem we see the absence of simile and metaphor but a clear use of extended imagery. The traveller in the poem has stopped his horse in a desolate landscape; it appears his only bond with the outside world is his horse.
'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' by Robert Frost
'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', like many of Frost's poems can be read on many different levels. The surface meaning is often a wonderfully evocative scene of nature with many deeper sublevels. In this poem we see the absence of simile and metaphor but a clear use of extended imagery. The traveller in the poem has stopped his horse in a desolate landscape; it appears his only bond with the outside world is his horse. The traveller seems to be aware that his impulse is out of place, he acknowledges that his horse knows the folly of this respite, he pursues this idea, seemingly adding reason to why he shouldn't stop, he is 'between the woods and frozen lake' on what he describes as 'the darkest evening of the year'.
In the first stanza the inverted syntax of the first line places the emphasis not on the traveller but on the woods. It is apparent that the motivation to stop here, on another mans property, is an aesthetic and relaxing one, 'he will not see me stopping here/to see his woods fill up with snow'.
The darkness of the woods is an image so important it is mentioned twice, emphasizing a connection between beauty and mystery. The emphasis on darkness is strange and more obvious because it is a snowy evening, when the dominant impression would have been the whiteness blanketing everything. The winter bleakness of the setting, 'frozen lake..", 'the gentle falling..', the 'lovely dark and deep woods..' establish a lonely tone and the symbolic weight of this brief moment when the speaker is drawn to what the woods represent, death perhaps, or at least a temporary respite from life's duties.
The realization of the choices facing him, are presented with the shaking of the harness bells. The traveller disregards the horses will to move on and remarks on the sound of the flurries around him. It would seem that the predominance of soft sibilant sounds like 'easy', 'downy' in describing wind and flake and the use of alliteration and assonance implies an almost hypnotic quality to the traveller's state of mind. The rhythm of the poem is rigidly regular, iambic tetrameter, and its rhyme is a complex pattern of interlocking stanzas. Each stanza is a complete sentence, and each stanza follows the structure of colloquial English.
By the end of the third stanza the traveller has paid tribute to the dangerous seductiveness of the woods; he seems ready to face the reality of the 'promises' he has to keep. The closing lines of the poem combine the contrary pulls of the poem, with the repetition of 'miles to go before I sleep', that at first appear to be little more than a literal reference to the journey he has to complete, the repetition gives it a particular resonance, this poem could be seen as representing the human struggle between the desire to slow down and notice the beauty of the moment versus mans' obligation to get about his business or perhaps a desire to sleep or even gentle longing for death.
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