Here’s a detailed analysis of Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening’; it’s tailored towards students taking the CIE / Cambridge A-Level syllabus but will be useful for anyone who’s working on understanding the poem at any level.
Great for revision, missed lessons,...
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.
STORY / SUMMARY
A man is travelling at night on a horse during the winter solstice (‘darkest evening of
the year’). He is on his way home, heading for a village as he travels through a
snowy landscape. He stops by a frozen wood, observing that he thinks he knows the
owner. The man who owns it lives far away, in the same village as the speaker, so he
knows he could trespass and enter the woods if he wanted as there’s no one around
to notice. He feels an impulse to go into the woods, and he is torn for a moment
between losing himself in there and carrying on home. The horse becomes impatient,
and shakes his harness to snap the man out of this state of mind. At the end of the
poem, he decides to go home because he has ‘promises to keep’, and sleep is a long
way off.
, SPEAKER/VOICE
The speaker uses clear, simple vocabulary to illustrate a complex psychological
problem. He is talking about the call of nature, the longing in humans to return to a
purely natural way of living outside of the existence that we’ve made for ourselves in
villages and cities. Alternatively, the poem has often been interpreted as an exploration
of suicidal thoughts or tendencies, and so in this sense the speaker is also arguably
talking about a death drive, the idea that we are enticed by the idea of our death and
we have a longing to return back to a state of inert matter (see context for more info).
LANGUAGE
● Sleep as a metaphor for death - quite common in Frost’s poetry (possible
exploration of suicidal urges) - the line ‘And miles to go before I sleep’ is
repeated twice at the end, giving the feeling of a lullaby or nodding off, but also
perhaps suggesting obsession or fixation on this idea of ‘sleep’, which is often
used symbolically in literature to represent the idea of death.
● An alternative interpretation that is not quite so bleak would be to interpret the
state of ‘sleep’ as passive, peaceful and calm, and the journey of the man as
active - requiring energy and effort. He is compelled to lose himself in the
woods because he is enticed by the passivity of that choice, sitting or slowly
wandering around the forest requires a lot less effort than the obligations and
‘promises’ he has to others to get back home soon. He convinces himself that he
really needs true rest rather than a short break, so he decides to go home as
‘sleep’ will be more beneficial than the short trip into the woods in the long
term.
● Extended metaphor - the whole poem and the voyage of the man on the horse
could be considered as an extended metaphor for life, the journey we must all
take with its ups and downs, the work we must do and the obligation we have
to others. This interpretation is particularly compelling if you interpret the ‘sleep’
in the final lines to mean death, as it allows us to understand that one of the
messages in the poem is that life is a constant struggle against the desire to
lose yourself, or to give in to death.
● Personification - The horse is given a character in the poem, and is therefore
personified. The speaker remarks that his ‘little horse must think it queer’ - the
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