Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - 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.
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.
Robert Frost,
the famous American poet was born on 26 March 1874 in San Francisco . He attended several schools,
but never got a degree, though sixteen honorary degrees were conferred on him
in subsequent years. He was in turn teacher, cobbler, editor and finally farmer
for eleven years. In 1912 he went to England where he met Rupert Brooke.
In 1915 he returned to the United
States and became Professor of Poetry at
Harvard. He received many academic awards of world fame and in the end was made
America ’s
national poet. He died on 29 January 1963.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is one of the most quietly
moving of Frost's lyrics. The lyric
says William O' Conner "like Milton's sonnet On His Blindness and Mathew
Arnold's Dover Beach, seems to have established itself permanently in
anthologies and text books of poetry. It is one of Frost's best poems, and we
might discover, if we had the means, that it is one of the best known poems of
the Twentieth Century". It was this
lyric which touched the heart of Pt. Jawahar Lal Nehru, one of the greatest men
of the world, and devoted servant of humanity.
The poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, is an expression of joy which
the felt as stood watching a familiar sight on a winter evening. A commonplace
scene of snowfall inspired Robert Frost to write some memorable lines in recent
English poetry. It is worth mentioning that the last stanza of this small poem
was noted down by Jawaherlal Nehru in his diary only one month before his
death.
“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.”
As he sits in his horse driven
carriage gazing into the soft, silent whiteness, he is tempted to say on and
on, allowing his mind to lose itself in the charming woods. John Lymen rightly
said “His consciousness seems to the verge of freeing itself from ordinary
life, as it were about dissolve in the blank but his mind holds back from this.
He remembers that his journey has a purpose. He has promises to keep and many
miles to go before can yield to the dreamlike release which the woods seem to
offer.” This is the core of the poem, a moving personal experience, exquisitely
rendered. The poem is not just a record
of something that once happened to the poet; it points outward area of
experience. It expresses the conflict, which everyone has felt, between the
demands of practical life with its obligations to others.
