Analysis of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

This poem began with what the actual experience of stopping at night by some dark woods in winter, and the fact that there were two horses. Frost remembered what he saw then. He had made some many corrections to this poem when he wrote it. For example, the line "Between a forest and a lake" is a notation, and "Between the woods and frozen lake" is a finished line of poetry. "A forest" is too big, too vague, but "the woods" s definite, and bounded. "A lake" has not the specific condition or picture of "frozen lake." This sort of revision, or what Frost calls, "touching up," is what makes a poem--this, plus the first inspiration. Either one, without the other, is unlikely to make a good poem.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" can be studied as perfected structure, with the photostat manuscript to show the art is not, though it must always appear to be, effortless. It can be thought of as a picture: the whites, grays, and blacks of the masses and areas of lake, field, and woods, with tiny figure of the man in the sleigh, and the horse. And it can be thought of as a statement of man's everlasting responsibility to man; thought the dark and nothingness tempt him to surrender, he will no give in. It is interesting to compare this poem with other later pieces of Frost's, in which he uses the same image, "Desert Places," and "Come In," none alike, all on the first level of his poetry, and all three built on the image of the pull of wildness and lawlessness against man's conscious will and the promises he has made to be kept.

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