Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost

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.

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.