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Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening: Themes
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 using light and dark imagery and
having his speaker favor the dark, Frost leads the reader toward an aesthetic
judgment about nature: that it is fascinating precisely for the things that
humans do not understand, for the depths that consciousness cannot penetrate.
The beauty of this scene is, of course, not registered by the horse, whom the
poem shows to be impatient. Once again, the poem shows beauty to exist in the
tension between understanding and non-understanding, which the horse does not
have the mental capacity to appreciate.
The only other indication of beauty this
speaker experiences is the silence of nature—"the sweep / Of easy wind and
downy flake." Of course, wind can be heard, but an "easy" wind
would just barely be perceptible; there is nothing audible about snowflakes
unless they are hard and frozen, not "downy" like soft feathers. By
bringing attention to these nearly immeasurable sounds, the poem offers us
another standard for beauty. The deep dark woods do not present any appreciable
pattern and the hushed blowing snow presents no melody: the source of nature's
beauty lies in its mystery, not its familiarity.
Return
to Nature
With sadness, "Stopping By Woods on a
Snowy Evening" examines just how difficult it has become in the modern
world for man to stay in touch with nature. The poem is made up of contrasting
images of the natural and the man-made: the woods and the village, the
farmhouse and the lake, even the horse and the harness-bells. The speaker is
enchanted with the things of nature, but is constantly reminded of human
things, and, after a few minutes of giving in to the enchantment, decides with
regret that this return to nature cannot last. In this poem humanity is
represented not just by objects but by the concept of ownership. The first two
words focus attention on an absent character about whom we only find out two
things: that he lives in the village, away from nature, and that he owns the woods. It is the irony of
this, which the owner does not appreciate what he has, that establishes the
poem's mood. Man, it tells us, is wasteful. One of the most striking things
about this piece is that the human and the animal appear to exchange their
values. The horse is the one who is in a hurry, who needs a place of business—a
farmhouse—in order to make sense of their brief stop. It is the human who is
able to temporarily put aside the idea of property ownership and destination
and to appreciate the moment. The horse is impatient, the human tranquil. This
shows us how completely the horse has been brought into the human world,
indicating the completeness of nature's transformation to mankind's uses. Other
works of literature, such as Thoreau's Walden, show us people casting aside
their social lives in order to live with nature, but in the world presented
here a brief unplanned visit with nature is all that is possible.
Duty
and Responsibility
The speaker of this poem has "promises
to keep," and regardless of what these promises are or who they were made
to they have to be fulfilled. Obviously, the scene in the wood is important to
this person, who is practically hypnotized by the falling snow. Another
observer might feel that experiencing this unexpectedly beautiful scene is more
important than anything, including promises, or that they are not responsible
for doing what they promised because they did not know, at the time the promise
was made, that this snowfall in the wood would be so attractive. Promises are
broken every day by people who find some reason to forgive themselves. The
speaker of this poem loves the snowfall's beauty enough to be distracted by it,
but even more than that he or she values keeping a promise. The repetition of
the final two lines gives us an indication of how this person feels about the
responsibilities that lie ahead: they are not frightening or unpleasant; they are
just tedious, involving travel, lack of sleep, and numbing repetition.
Unenthusiastic about obligations but enthusiastic about the snowfall, this
speaker nevertheless lives up to the promises that were made.
Stopping
by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Style
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening" is written in iambic tetrameter. "Iambic" means that
each metrical foot contains two syllables, an unstressed one followed by a
stressed one. "Tetrameter" means that each line contains four
metrical feet. So a poem written in iambic tetrameter would contain a total of
eight syllables in each line.
This idea will become clearer if we scan a
line, or diagram the meter: Of easy wind and downy flake. When the line is
scanned, it will look like this: Of eas / y wind / and down / y flake. Such
metrical patterns generally make poetry sound more musical. Occasionally, a
line will vary from the established pattern, which often emphasizes the
importance of that line.
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening" also relies on rhyme to achieve some of its music. For the first
three stanzas, the rhyme scheme is consistent. Its pattern is aaba bbcb cede.
The fourth stanza, however, rhymes every line with d. This means that in the
first stanza, lines one, two, and four rhyme with each other, with line three
("here") seeming odd. However, in stanza two, lines one, two, and
four rhyme with "here," while the rhyme on line three,
"lake," is picked up in stanza three. Such a pattern links the
stanzas together and indicates that the ideas contained in the stanzas are
strongly related.
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