“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
— by Robert Frost

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.

— Comments —

Robert Robbins writes:

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is not a nice poem, in this sense, that it is not a happy poem. I love the poem, and memorized it in school. But Frost has a very sneaky way about him, coming off sweet when what he is really doing is calling us to the darkness of a nihilistic nightmare.

Laura writes:

Robert Frost has a nihilistic side, that’s for sure. But I don’t think “Stopping by Woods” is a great example of it. (“Out, Out” is perhaps.) Anyone who has seen snow fall in almost complete darkness can appreciate, I think, this other-worldly quality he describes. To say that darkness is “lovely,” is that “not nice?” I don’t know, maybe it is.

Some of his poems are sad and depressing (then again, life is sad and depressing at times), but others are inspiring. Here’s another good one, “Choose Something Like a Star:”

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud –
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,*
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

I confess: I have no idea what “Keats’s eremite” is.

Johanna writes:

I looked up “eremite” and it seems to mean something like a hermit.

Laura writes:

Thank you for looking that up. What a wonderful comparison: A star as lonely as a hermit in the vast wilderness of the sky.

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