Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Key Poetic Devices

Alliteration

Alliteration (uh-LIT-uh-RAY-shun) refers to instances when either consonant or vowel sounds repeat at the beginning of consecutive or nearby words. Frost uses this technique frequently throughout “Stopping by Woods,” though he does so in quiet ways that might easily escape the reader’s notice. The reason Frost’s alliteration may initially evade perception is that he tends only to alliterate using soft consonant sounds. Consider the opening stanza as an example (lines 1–4):

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.

At least one example of alliteration appears in each of these lines, but the alliterating sounds all have a soft, quiet quality. Twice in this stanza Frost uses repeating W sounds, which have a slight whooshing quality. He also conjures the sound of wind through the sibilance of S sounds and the breathiness of H sounds. Taken together, these examples of alliteration endow Frost’s language with an understated poetic sensuousness. This sensuousness subtly evokes the softly breezy atmosphere depicted in the poem while simultaneously contributing to the poem’s prevailing sense of calm.

End-stopping and Enjambment

End-stopping refers to when a poetic line ends with a forced pause. By contrast, enjambment (en-JAM-ment) refers when one poetic line flows into another without stopping at the end. In “Stopping by Woods,” Frost manages the relationship between these two techniques in a way that subtly mirrors speaker’s hesitation in deciding about whether to remain stopped or to carry on. The line endings exhibit a similar tension between pausing and proceeding. Though they all end with a period, each stanza takes a distinct approach to individual line endings. In stanza 1, for instance, the lines are mostly end-stopped, which reflects the speaker’s initial instinct to stop by the woods. In stanza 2, by contrast, all lines except the last one are enjambed, which reflects the horse’s clear desire to push on. Stanza 3 features an oscillating pattern of enjambed and end-stopped lines. Here, the horse’s desire to go and the speaker’s desire to stay balance each other out. Finally, all lines in stanza 4 end with a comma except the last. The partial stop at the end of each line reflects the speaker’s continued hesitation about whether to stay or go.

Personification

Personification refers to instances where a poet invests a nonhuman animal, inanimate object, or abstract concept with human-like attributes or feelings. Personification is essentially a figurative method of description. Consider the sentence, The flowers dance in the wind. This sentence obviously doesn’t mean that the flowers are literally dancing in the wind. Instead, the wind is blowing through the flowers, causing them to move around as if they were dancing. Frost, however, uses personification in an unusually literal way. In the poem’s second stanza, the speaker posits that their horse “must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near” (lines 5–6). Of course, the horse wouldn’t frame his concern in these terms, which imply an awareness of human social norms and human expectations of rationality. Even so, if the speaker attributes this attitude to his horse, it’s because they know their horse well enough to understand how the animal communicates (lines 9–10):

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.

The speaker interprets the shake of their horse’s head as a concrete and direct expression of irritation and confusion. The speaker’s interpretation may not be exactly right. However, their best guess is the result of an intimate relationship, and hence at least partly right.

Repetition

“Stopping by Woods” concludes with one of the best-known examples of repetition in English-language poetry (lines 13–16):

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.

There are two ways of identifying the type of repetition featured here. Perhaps the simplest term is refrain, which refers to instances where a word, phrase, or line gets repeated over the course of a poem. Typically, though, a refrain doesn’t appear twice in quick succession, but rather gets repeated at intervals. For this reason, an alternative term for the type of repetition in Frost’s poem is epizeuxis (EH-pih-ZOOK-sis), which occurs when a word or phrase is repeated back-to-back. Regardless of the formal term we use to describe it, what’s most important is to account for the repetition’s rhetorical effect. The repeated lines give the end of “Stopping by Woods” a soothing quality that’s reminiscent of lullabies, which often conclude with refrains. Yet there’s also something unsettling that arises in the repetition. Whereas the first iteration of “And miles to go before I sleep” has a literal meaning, when repeated the line takes on a more figurative sense. The second iteration of “miles to go” suggests the journey of life, while the final “sleep” seems akin to death.

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