The title "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," almost sums up Frost’s poem. The language stays simple, but an eerie sense of melancholy and enchantment builds. You sense it’s about a lot more than snow and trees. And it leads to one of the most famous endings of a poem in American history.
What does it mean? Is it about death? Life? Why does he repeat that last line?
“We have many statements about it. And they don't all agree," Frost scholar Phil Holland said. “Well, of course, there was public response and curiosity, and he was mostly reticent on that subject. Read it for yourself. Isn’t it obvious?”
Maybe not obvious to everyone, but Frost gave some clues. One was a story he told of an evening in New Hampshire, where he lived at the time, on his way into town with a horse and buggy to buy Christmas presents.
“It began to snow, he dropped the reins of the horse, and the horse stopped," Holland said. "There they are in the middle of the woods and Frost began to cry, to bawl, that was the word that he used. But the horse said, by shaking the harness bells, ‘let's go.’ ... And they did arrive home, no presents, lots of love. That's how Frost told the story.”
But Frost wrote it in his Vermont stone house on a sunny summer morning — not in New Hampshire in winter. He waited. Why?
“This is where the mystery really deepens," Holland said. "What was it that led him to write that poem down? He had been up all night writing another poem, and a very different kind of poem. He called it ‘New Hampshire’ — 400 lines of blank verse. He brought that to a conclusion, he says, around dawn. and this other poem came to him, ‘almost as if I'd had a hallucination.’ He claimed to have gone back inside later and written it down without strain.”
A quick composition that’s been pondered over for more than a century.
“There's a lot unspoken in the poem," Holland said. "The tone is difficult to pin down. Is it lighthearted at first? Or is it some kind of death wish meditation? And it can be taken in multiple ways.”
Nevertheless, the poem has endured. That’s evident at the Robert Frost Stone House Museum, where Erin McKinney is director.
“We have so many people come to the museum, all ages, and talk about their experience of this poem," McKinney said. "And so we actually kept a notebook.”
Last year was the 100th anniversary of Frost’s famous poem. The museum invited visitors to write down their thoughts in the notebook.
Erin flips through the page and finds one visitor’s note:
“Just before I sobered up, my mother quoted, ‘the woods are lovely, dark and deep. I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep in my journal on the front page. I have 15 years and miles to go before I sleep."
The museum keeps that note — and all the others from visitors — in what may well be the same room where Frost wrote his poem more than a century ago.
