Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
contrasts the world of beauty with the world
of human obligation. — Discuss
Answers
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” one of Robert Frost’s most well-known poems, was published in his collection called New Hampshire in 1923. This poem illustrates many of the qualities most characteristic of Frost, including the attention to natural detail, the relationship between humans and nature, and the strong theme suggested by individual lines. In this poem, the speaker appears as a character. It is a dark and quiet winter night, and the speaker stops his horse in order to gaze into the woods. The speaker projects his own thoughts onto the horse, who doesn’t understand why they have stopped; there’s no practical reason to stop. The woods are ominously tempting and acquire symbolic resonance in the last stanza, which concludes with one of Frost’s often-quoted lines, “miles to go before I sleep.” One interpretation of this stanza is that the speaker is tempted toward death which he considers “lovely, dark and deep,” but that he has many responsibilities to fulfill before he can “sleep.”