Robert Frost wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in 1922, under circumstances that have since become the stuff of legend. Frost claimed that, after having worked all night on his long poem “New Hampshire,” he then wrote “Stopping by Woods” at dawn, penning its four stanzas in “a few minutes without strain.” This account of the poem’s composition has helped secure the poem’s aura of simplicity. Written almost entirely in monosyllables and with an easy iambic meter, the poem features a speaker who’s traveling on horseback through a winter landscape. Transfixed by the accumulation of snow in a wooded area, the speaker contemplates stopping to rest a while. But a concern about the owner of the woods and a sense of their horse’s irritation at stopping complicate the speaker’s desire to stay. Furthermore, the speaker has made “promises” (line 14) to some person in some other place, which also compels them to carry on. The poem ultimately leaves the speaker in the midst of making a difficult choice, one that situates them in a broader opposition between the allure of the natural world and the obligations of social life.

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