Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening: Important Quotes Explained

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.

The speaker opens the poem with these four lines, which introduce the basic opposition between the simple allure of the natural world and the complicating responsibilities of social life. The speaker stops by some woods simply to watch them “fill up with snow.” However, the evident tranquility of such an image is immediately complicated by the speaker’s awareness that the woods aren’t a purely “natural” landscape. Instead, they are the private property of some individual owner. Because of this, the speaker’s presence in this landscape legally constitutes trespassing. Even though the owner lives in the nearby village and hence can’t actually see them, the speaker engages in a moment of self-policing. Thus, despite stopping to enjoy the beauty and calm of a natural phenomenon, the speaker remains aware of how the social world infringes on their experience.

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.

In lines 5–8, the speaker once again considers what others might think of their actions. Rather than directly acknowledge their own desire to stay and rest in the tranquility of the snowy evening, the speaker shifts their attention from the woods’ owner to the horse they are riding. The horse’s behavior indicates his confusion and irritation. In a moment of subtle personification, the speaker posits that their horse “must think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near.” Of course, the horse wouldn’t frame his concern in these terms, which imply an awareness of human social norms and human expectation of rationality. Instead, the speaker’s interpretation of their horse reveals their own social hang-ups. Again, they’ve diverted their attention away what they want to do an awareness of what they think they should be doing.

The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

In lines 11–12, the speaker stops considering others’ perspectives and fully acknowledges the power of their attraction to the snowy woods. Frost communicates the force of this attraction in part through the tranquil beauty of the image depicted in these two lines. Other than the brief reference to the woods “fill[ing] up with snow” in line 4, the lines quoted here offer the poem’s only concrete image of the snow-swept landscape. In addition to the use of imagery, Frost also enhances the power of these lines through his sensuous use of language. These two lines prominently feature assonance and consonance, both of which refer to the repetition of certain sounds in adjacent or nearby words. Assonance specifically refers to the repetition of vowel sounds. These lines prominently feature both O and EE sounds, which may be said to mimic the shifting pitch of a winter wind as it rises and falls. By contrast, consonance refers to the repetition of consonants, the most prominent of which in these lines are the soft TH sounds as well as the wispy sibilance of S sounds. As with the assonance, the consonance conjures a soundscape to accompany to the visual image of a snowy landscape.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

Line 13 has been the source of some controversy in the history of this poem’s publication and reception. The line as it’s quoted above appears exactly the way Frost intended it. However, editors have been tempted to insert a second comma after the word “dark.” The reason for this temptation has something to do with what’s known as the serial comma, which is the comma that appears after the penultimate item in a list. Editors often insist on using serial commas because they prevent unnecessary ambiguity. Consider the following sentence:

I went to the movies with my friends, my mom and my dad.

Here, it seems like I’m saying my mom and my dad are the friends I went to the movies with, which isn’t what I meant! To clarify that my friends are different from my mom and dad, I need a serial comma:

I went to the movies with my friends, my mom, and my dad.

Frost’s early editors and interpreters applied this same logic to the above line, insisting it should read, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep.” In this version, the line is purely descriptive, meaning that the woods are lovely and dark and deep. But Frost didn’t want the serial comma. In his preferred version, the line claims that the woods are lovely because they are dark and deep.