Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as conceptual example

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

In the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," poet Robert Frost uses a specific situation to make a general comment on the course of life and the obligations faced by the speaker. Part of the statement is that people have obligations that keep them focused. Another part is that these obligations wear differently at different times in life. A third part is that people can take a moment and find respite from their busy lives and then go back to what they have to do.

The conversational tone of the poem creates a sense of reality causes the reader to accept that the poet is speaking the truth as he perceives it. The situation is clear from the title, and it is made more specific in the course of the poem as we learn that the speaker is in a wagon or buggy drawn by a horse. As he passes through the woods, he is drawn by the peace and beauty of Nature seen all around him, and this takes the attention of the speaker away from his duties and toward the peace and tranquility that would come if he were to fuse with nature and abandon the human issues he faces in society. However, the speaker cannot do this, for he has a strong sense of duty to himself and others that prevents him from surrendering to the lure of nature and from abandoning the affairs of this world. Frost uses enjambment to carry the reader from one line to the next and so to link the images, creating a flowing experience that is like life, with each event emerging from the one before. This also gives the poem a structure mirroring life, and it can be read not just as a specific situation but as a representation of the course of life, with this moment of reflection coming at a mid-point on the journey.

The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, and this meter is observed carefully throughout the poem. The regularity of the meter has two effects -- it creates a certain lazy feeling that contributes to the idea that the speaker is tired and wants to go to sleep, and it imitates the regularity of the horse's hooves when the carriage is moving. It also serves as a representation of the flow of life, which may seem random at a given moment but which has an overall flow that can be discerned by an objective view. The rhyme scheme is also regular, with a slight variation in the last of the four stanzas. The scheme is AABA in the first stanza, and BBCB in the second. The third is CCDC, and the variation in the fourth is that the scheme is DDDD. Again, this shift in rhyme along with the repetition of the third line, repeated exactly as the fourth line, again indicates sleepiness in a way that casts a spell over the reader. The use of enjambment has a similar effect, contributing to the sense of continuity and rhythm.

The speaker has made this journey before, and the stop now being made by the speaker is unusual, as is indicated in the second stanza as the speaker notes how his horse may find this "queer" because the speaker has chosen a place far from civilization. This is conveyed by ideas connected by enjambment:

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near (5-6).

The horse is here treated as another sentient being, while Nature on a quiet evening is snow and woods. The snow creates a white background that the listener can picture and that thus has a purity that is disturbed by those moving through it. This image might also be seen as another representation of life, as a clean slate that the individual makes of what he can.