Beauty

This poem presents nature as a standard of beauty that is so strong that it captures the speaker's attention and makes him or her halt whatever they are doing. There are not many descriptive words used to convey what it is that the speaker finds so beautiful, only "lovely," "dark" and "deep." Of these, "lovely" simply restates the whole idea of the poem, which most readers would already have gotten a sense of from the speaker's tone and actions. The darkness of the woods is an idea so important that it is mentioned twice in this poem, emphasizing a connection between beauty and mystery. The emphasis on darkness is strange, and more obvious because the poem takes place on a snowy evening, when the dominant impression would have been the whiteness blanketing everything. Some reviewers interpret the fascination with darkness as a death wish, which Frost discounted. By...