How Robert Frost Wrote One of His Most Famous Poems, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions of Amer­i­can stu­dents have now had the expe­ri­ence of being told by an Eng­lish teacher that they’d been read­ing Robert Frost all wrong, even if they’d nev­er read him at all. Most, at least, had seen his lines “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less trav­eled by, / And that has made all the dif­fer­ence” — or in any case, they’d heard them quot­ed with intent to inspire. “ ‘The Road Not Tak­en’ has noth­ing to do with inspi­ra­tion and stick-to-it-ive­ness,” writes The Hedge­hog Review’s Ed Simon in a reflec­tion on Frost’s 150th birth­day. Rather, “it’s a melan­cholic exha­la­tion at the futil­i­ty of choice, a dirge about endur­ing in the face of mean­ing­less­ness.”

Sim­i­lar­ly mis­in­ter­pret­ed is Frost’s sec­ond-known poem, “Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” whose wag­on-dri­ving nar­ra­tor declares that “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.” You can hear the whole thing read aloud by Frost him­self in the new video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.  “What draws me in is the crys­talline clar­i­ty of the imagery,” says Puschak. “You instant­ly pic­ture this qui­et, win­try evening scene that Frost con­jures,” one that feels as if it belongs in “a lim­i­nal space” where “time and nature are not divid­ed and struc­tured in human ways.”

Frost evokes this feel­ing “pre­cise­ly by struc­tur­ing time and space in a human way” — that is, using the struc­tures of poet­ry. Puschak breaks down the rel­e­vant tech­niques like its rhythm, meter, and rhyme scheme (rhyming being a qual­i­ty of his work that once got him labeled, as Simon puts it, “a jin­gle man out of step with the prosod­ic con­ven­tions of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry”). But “the seem­ing sim­plic­i­ty of the imagery, phras­ing, and struc­ture of this poem con­ceal a lot of sub­tle­ty,” and the more you look at it, “the more you see the real world intrud­ing on the nar­ra­tor’s med­i­ta­tive moment.”

“It’s hard not to read ‘Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ as con­cern­ing self-anni­hi­la­tion (albeit self-anni­hi­la­tion avoid­ed),” writes Simon. After all, why place that “But” after “the obser­va­tion of the dark, love­ly final­i­ty of the woods, of that frozen lake so amenable to drown­ing one­self, if only then to reaf­firm that here are promis­es to keep, miles to go before he sleeps, respon­si­bil­i­ties and duties that must be ful­filled before death can be enter­tained?” This is hard­ly the kind of sub­ject you’d expect from “the Nor­man Rock­well of verse,” as Frost’s sheer acces­si­bil­i­ty led many to per­ceive him. But as with poet­ry of any cul­ture or era, suf­fi­cient­ly close read­ing is what real­ly makes all the dif­fer­ence.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear Robert Frost Read His Most Famous Poems: “The Road Not Tak­en,” “Mend­ing Wall,” “Noth­ing Gold Can Stay” & More

Lis­ten to Robert Frost Read ‘The Gift Out­right,’ the Poem He Recit­ed from Mem­o­ry at JFK’s Inau­gu­ra­tion

How Emi­ly Dick­in­son Writes A Poem: A Short Video Intro­duc­tion

How John Keats Writes a Poem: A Line-by-Line Break­down of “Ode on a Gre­cian Urn”

How E. E. Cum­mings Writes a Poem

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.


by | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (6)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Sharon E Scharff says:

    Stop­ping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening has always been my favorite. I remem­ber Pres­i­dent Kennedy’s inau­gu­ra­tion, although I was maybe 16 & too young to vote.

  • James Hutson says:

    Frost was a mar­velous communicator.He seemed to be able to say the most with words.

  • Maureen Downing says:

    Ima New Hamp­shire girl myself so Frost’s poems always remind me of home.

  • John V. Wright says:

    Just to explain. Like all mod­ern poets, Robert Frost delib­er­ate­ly pro­duced work that could be inter­pret­ed in a num­ber of ways. Frost was a superb crafts­man — you don’t win four Pulitzer Prizes on sheer inspi­ra­tion alone — and this poem is no excep­tion. It is about famil­iar­i­ty, part of that range of human con­di­tions that Frost so bril­liant­ly elic­its through­out his work.
    Yes, the rhyming scheme is cru­cial but not quite in the way that Evan iden­ti­fies. First of all, we know that this love­ly poem is about famil­iar­i­ty because Frost tells us it is — three times, at the start, in the mid­dle and at the end. He thinks he is acquaint­ed with the own­er of the woods — indeed, he even knows where he lives. Famil­iar­i­ty. Sec­ond­ly, although we no longer get about on horse­back as folk did in New Eng­land in the ear­ly part of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, any­one who has walked a dog and stopped to chat to some­one, recog­nis­es instant­ly the puz­zled reac­tion of the horse. The dog pulling at the leash, eager to move onto the next smell. Why have we stopped here? Famil­iar­i­ty. And final­ly the need to make the next dead­line. Promis­es to keep. Meet­ings to go to. Trains to catch. Webi­na­rs to log into. Famil­iar­i­ty.
    And apart from the sub­lime lan­guage, Frost nails it all into place with the rhyming scheme. AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. Each suc­ces­sive verse has three lines that have a phys­i­cal rela­tion­ship with the third line of the pre­vi­ous verse. The read­er recog­nis­es the rhyme because he has encoun­tered it ear­li­er. Yes folks, in a poem about famil­iar­i­ty, Robert Frost has phys­i­cal­ly built into THE STRUCTURE OF THE POEM ITSELF the real­i­ty of famil­iar­i­ty con­tained with­in the rhyming scheme.
    This is not by acci­dent. This is a poet­ic genius at work.

  • Eric Anthony says:

    “Well Said” as my nono­genar­i­an VT farmer use to say in agree­ment and approval. Frost’s genius shines through in his feel for the set­ty­ings, the charc­ters he cre­ates, his under­stand­ing of the scope his audi­ence appre­ci­a­tion before even get­ting to his amaz­ing mas­tery of Eng­lish find­ing the words that con­vey all that as well while fit­ting the rhyme, rythm, meter, etc. that present his mes­sage in a way that glows through time and change..

  • Gail Logan says:

    As a Mid­dle­bury Col­lege stu­dent my broth­er George knew Robert Frost. He and oth­er stu­dents often say& talked with him in local cof­fee shop. Frost was a wise hum­ble knowl­edge­able man who enjoyed shar­ing com­pa­ny with oth­ers. How priv­i­leged they were. Gail Logan

Leave a Reply

Quantcast