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Unit 6: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book— Notes
including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the
Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and
though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof
from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional
or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is
a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the
psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with
layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost’s early
work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources
of its own delight in the world,” and comments on Frost’s career as The American Bard: “He
became a national celebrity, our nearly official Poet Laureate, and a great performer in the
tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable
verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in
Boston on January 29, 1963.

6.1 An Overview

Frost wrote the poem in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had been up the
entire night writing the long poem “New Hampshire” and had finally finished when he
realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. He wrote the new poem “about the snowy evening
and the little horse as if I’d had a hallucination” in just “a few minutes without strain.”
The poem is written in iambic tetrameter in the Rubaiyat stanza created by Edward Fitzgerald.
Each verse (save the last) follows an a-a-b-a rhyming scheme, with the following verse’s a’s
rhyming with that verse’s b, which is a chain rhyme (another example is the terza rima used
in Dante’s Inferno.) Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.

6.2 Use in Eulogies

In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting reported
the arrival of President John F. Kennedy’s casket to the White House. As Frost was one of the
President’s favourite poets, Davis concluded his report with a passage from this poem but was
overcome with emotion as he signed off.

At the funeral of former Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, on October 3, 2000, his
eldest son Justin rephrased the last line of this poem in his eulogy: “The woods are lovely,
dark and deep. He has kept his promises and earned his sleep.

6.3 In Popular Culture

The poem is discussed in The Sopranos episode “Proshai, Livushka,” in which Meadow explains
the poem’s meaning to her brother, AJ. American composer Randall Thompson included the
poem in his choral work, “Frostiana: Seven Country Songs,” which was originally conducted
by Thompson with Frost in attendance. Another choral interpretation, titled Sleep, was written

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