FROST AND THE NECESSITY OF METAPHOR 125say that “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” came in one go, and his
voice does start naturally here.
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.The overlapping rhymes move like Dante ’s in the Divine Comedy (which begins,
“Midway through the journey of our life / I found myself in a dark wood”).
Frost ’s ongoing scheme, in this poem about stopping, makes the final stanza all
the more perplexing.
Something more than a Currier and Ives twilight idyll is in the making.
Whose woods these are I only thinkI know, I’m almost trespassing, and watch-
ing woods sublimely fill with snow can feel somber too. It ’s queer to stop in an
isolated spot, freezing and dark, it may even be a mistake.
Another voice pulls dark and deep on this poem. The Frost children used to
recite a traditional (if grim) bedtime prayer from the eighteenth-century New
England Primer:
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.A striking coincidence: this prayer’s four-beat lines and rhyme sounds tally with
Frost ’s, while “keep” and “sleep” turn up to silence his voice.
Endless questions trouble sleep in the closing stanza. Its first line, “The woods
are lovely, dark and deep,” often gets a standard comma added after “dark,”
even in authorized editions. But no comma belongs there. Nature must be lovely
because it ’s both“dark and deep.” So what keeps the journeyer from keeping
promises? Lovely or deeply tempting woods? Perhaps open-ended “promises”