Today’s Poem: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Marking the spring equinox in the winter-solstice woods

Anton Genberg, Winter Landscape of Norrland with Birch Trees, 1933 (Wikimedia Commons)

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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.
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“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” perhaps the best-known poem by Robert Frost (1874–1963), is one of those poems whose surface consistency mesmerizes and lulls, exerting the kind of enchantment that, as Dana Gioia has written, is the chief property of poetry. Yet that lulling, like the skin of ice on a pond, thinly covers the black waters that lie below.

The interlocking rubaiyat stanzas, with their aaba-bbcb-ccdc-dddd rhyme scheme, create a closed and predictable structural cosmos for the poem. The repeated rhymes are exact to the point of inevitability. The tetrameter regularity, iamb iamb iamb iamb, becomes almost soporific: a cradle, a lullaby, the drowsy muffled one-two note of trotting hooves on packed snow. You are getting very sleepy, says the poem in a subliminal voice, rather like the sensation of warmth stealing over the limbs of a person freezing to death in the woods in the dark.

Some weeks back, we considered Frost’s later poem, “Acquainted with the Night,” as a response to, or perhaps a further development of, the grimmer implications of this one, included in the poet’s 1923 New Hampshire.

Today, the day after the spring equinox, seems as good a time as any to reflect on this winter-solstice poem, in a collection marking the emergence of a poet who, ten years into a relatively late-life career, was finding himself increasingly capable of writing not beauty or despair, sun or shadow, a choice between two poles, but a whole vision in which the undeniable beauty of the world could be, and was inevitably, undercut by darkness, danger, and ambiguity.

Robert Frost in 1959 (Wikimedia Commons)

Even given its mnemonic regularity — this is a particularly easy poem to memorize — and the gorgeousness of its sounds, “Stopping by Woods” continually disturbs in its ambivalence. Always, beneath the beautiful, frozen surface, the deadly water glints. There are cracks in the ice. The poem begins, in fact, with one of those cracks. The first foot of the first line disrupts the metronome tick of iambic tetrameter, even before that metronome winds up: “Whose woods” is a weightier, more portentous phrase, more spondee-like, than the first foot of any other line in the poem.

In that first stanza, shifts in the speaker’s tone unsettle that surface further. First the speaker thinks he knows whose woods these are, but by the second line he’s dismissed that weighty “who” to the village with the hasty certainty of a person who hope’s he’s right but isn’t sure. And anyway, by the third and fourth lines, the “who” isn’t there and won’t see somebody trespassing, there in the dark.

The assurance is hardly reassuring. The second stanza begins on this sense of transgression. Are we doing something wrong? What are our intentions, here? The “little horse,” with his survival instinct, remains unconvinced by this urgent need to stop. It’s the human being who finds the early nightfall compelling, the seductive “sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.” It’s the man who is hypnotized, perilously, by the loveliness, darkness, and depth of those lonely woods.

In that last stanza, things stand still. The poet suspends the interlocking pattern of rhymes, ending on a four-line repetition of the d-rhyme introduced in the previous stanza. Suddenly the speaker has stopped by those woods in a new and more potentially final way. Seduced by their deadly peace, he could simply stay there until he freezes solid. But for all the emphatic finality that this repetition suggests, there’s also a certain ambivalent open-endedness to the ending.

The pattern doesn’t doesn’t turn back, reaching for its a-rhyme as a way to close the circle, but it also doesn’t move on. This is the end, but it’s weirdly inconclusive. It stops, spins its wheels, sticks at its rhyme. The man thinks of the deadly beauty of the woods, seeming to ask himself, What if I just didn’t go on, but at the same time he also considers those “promises to keep, / And miles to go.”

Like the man, the stanza loiters, at once resolved and unresolved, closed but left ajar. The horse can’t literally trot in place, but that is more or less the effect. Meanwhile, the man sits on in the sleigh, neither driving on nor getting out and leaving the horse to make his own way home. The poem ends in this seeming indecision. Yet, as throughout the poem, the meter continues, trot-trot-trot-trot, lulling and mesmerizing, but also implacable in its pace: time moving on, the universe in constant motion, and the tiny speaker in the woods caught up against his will in its machinations.

This is a darker reading of the ending than simply to say that he’s left in ambivalence, but that reading coexists plausibly with other possibilities. I dislike overdeterminist readings of “Stopping By Woods,” that cast it as a poem about suicidal ideation — full stop — but there is no getting around the vein of darkness in Frost’s poetry generally, or in this poem in particular. Or if not darkness, then disquietude or mistrust: the universe is beautiful in its silent mysteries, but the mystery is dark at its core.

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