Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost (1927)
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.
The poem that even people who don’t care for poetry probably know. (I had to memorize it in second grade.). And despite its status as something approaching the van-Gogh’s-Starry-Night of poetry, I still think of it as the quintessential winter poem. (But, then, I also like van Gogh’s Starry Night.) As your elementary or middle school teacher may have pointed out, it’s a poem of approximately 110 words in which not more than 14 are more than one syllable. From simple common words—woods, snow, deep, dark, wind, lake—Frost has painted a scene that still evokes, for readers who as a rule do not do their errands on horseback or live in “villages,” a certain iconic American pastoral. And without diminishing the simple beauty of that scene, it also shivers (if that's the right word) with intimations—of the strangeness and inscrutable nature of some of life’s passages; of the tension between the material and the spiritual, between the yearning for transcendence (and its culmination in our final sleep) and the priority of our everyday obligations and promises.
I read that Frost said he wrote it one early morning, after a long sleepless night of working, and that it came to him almost whole, instantly, “like an hallucination.” I believe it. There is something almost clairvoyant about it.
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