I always knew I was going to end this series with this Frost poem, in part because of the last stanza and its reminder to keep one’s promises even while tarrying awhile to enjoy nature. After a month spent pausing over poems, it felt like the right way to finish.
The poem
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.
Listening
Listen to Robert Frost read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
PennSound has two early recordings of Frost reading the poem. The 1933 version is the first recording on the page.
Dare I say it: Robert Frost is a far better poet and writer than he is at reciting his poems! It is nevertheless great to hear it in his own voice. :)
What I learned
For a poem that sounds so effortless, it is very tightly constructed. Frost wrote it in 1922 at his farm in South Shaftsbury, Vermont, after staying up all night working on the much longer poem “New Hampshire.” He later described “Stopping by Woods” as a kind of second growth from that night’s work. It appeared in New Hampshire in 1923, the collection that won him his first Pulitzer Prize.
The form is doing more work than I noticed at first. There are four stanzas of four lines, each written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. In each of the first three stanzas, the rhyme that seems to stray becomes the main rhyme of the next, quietly pulling the poem onwards. The last stanza finally stops passing a rhyme forward. Every line closes on the same sound: deep, keep, sleep, sleep.
There is also a darker reading. “Sleep” can mean no more than sleep, but it can also suggest death, making the woods a tempting place of escape or oblivion. The poem does not make us choose. It still works as a traveller stopping for a few quiet minutes before remembering his obligations. The woods let him pause. His promises make him move again.
What stayed with me
It will not come as a surprise that the lines that stayed with me are:
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,