This week’s poem is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost and I’ve chosen it because of the weather this week.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
Robert Frost (1874—1963)
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Poem 420. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
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.
Robert Frost paints a picture in just sixteen lines and it is rather like The Listeners by Walter de la Mare. We do not know where the narrator is bound or where they are but the imagery is very clear.
The scene is a stretch of land which I assume is somewhere in Frost’s beloved New England. We see the landscape just as Frost saw it: a swell of land rising from the lake to the woods, and the snowflakes falling and adding to the frost on the ground and bleaching the woods. The driver of a cart or horse buggy has stopped to take in the view and ruminate on the silence and the promise—perhaps of sanctuary—offered by the woods while his horse shakes itself, either questioning the driver’s decision to stop or signalling that the chilly air is penetrating even its warm coat.
We get the feeling that the driver is on some mission, perhaps more important than delivering goods, and has stopped to spend a moment with their thoughts. In the last stanza they rouse themselves from their reverie, recalling their mission: they have “promises to keep,/And miles to go before I sleep” so we understand that this is a brief halt in a long journey.
This mirrors the writing of the poem itself: according to Wikipedia, Frost had spent the night writing his long poem New Hampshire and having finished near dawn, he went out to watch the sun rise and the poem came to him like “a hallucination”. We get the sense of his fatigue and the long journey of writing all night and the perception that this is a brief but welcome interlude in the process of writing, finishing and publishing a long poem.
I like it because it evokes the sense of being miles away from other people on a clear, frosty evening with snow in the air and because of its air of mystery—what promises is the narrator bound to keep and where are they travelling?
There are several performances on YouTube but I have to choose Frost’s own performance on the Well Read channel.