Stopping by Woods on Summer\'s

Stopping by Woods on Summer's Day": Frost's Use Of The Literal And Metaphysical In Making Great Literature

During the booming 1920s filled with roaring music, culture, and civil rights movements, one poet literally took time to smell the roses. Most think of Frost in association with his most famous poem, "The Road Not Taken" which combines the literal and psychological situation incurred by a man who is faced with a choice. But "The Road Not Taken" is not the only Frost poem in which the poet uses nature as the vehicle of emotional and psychological truths. In fact, another of Frost's more famous works, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" uses the same setting, a woods, to imply the importance of personal reflection. Once again, Frost combines both a literal and metaphysical situation in this poem, creating a spectacular peace of literature both for its literary value and for its universal implication.

In the poem, Frost's description of the narrator stopping by the woods to watch the falling snow paints a beautiful portrait of an ordinary event. Using the poetic techniques if imagery and end rhyme, the poem allows readers to imagine the snow piling up in a lonely woods as if they were really experiencing the event. This is most evident in the lines referring to the narrator's horse. Frost writes:

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" (Frost 5-12).

While the end rhyme moves the reader speedily along these lines, the intricate description of the horse as he "gives his harness bells a shake" allow the reader to hear the tinkle of bells even though wound imagery is not used in this line (Frost 9). Just two lines later, however, Frost satisfies the reader's need to hear by using onomatopoeia to suggest "the only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake" (Frost 11-12). By continuing to describe the woods as "lovely, dark and deep," followed by the repeated lines, "and miles to go before I sleep," Frost closes the poem with a mysteriously beautiful picture of the woods before lulling the reader to sleep through repetition (Frost 16, 19-20). Thus, Frost's literal description of a simple event qualifies this poem as a piece of good literature as readers, carried by the end rhyme, experience the silence of the woods on a winter night.