Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

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.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

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.

   Structure – title – layout - denotation

The title of the poem is Stopping By Woods on a Snowy evening and it was written by Robert Frost. Just reading it I think it’s strange because people generally stay at home when it snow, but in this case the protagonist is in front of a wood. Reading the title I suppose the story is setted in winter . The rhythm of the title like the one of all the poem is trochee. The title is an invitation for the reader to stop , it creates curiosity about why protagonist stop. In the poem there are 4 stanzas, and in each stanza there are 4 lines.

Connotation

In the first line there is an alliteration of the letter –w that may remember an howl of a wolf.

In the first line there’s also an anaphoric structure(I – I, assonance). In the second line there is an other alliteration(his/house), but there’s also a sibilance(his house his). So, I can understand that the protagonist is a man, and the speaking voice is the poet.

In the third line there is an assonance, a repetition of the vowel sound(see me). The profound vowel sounds in the whole poem add sadness, and create breaks.

His harness bells is a sibilance.

Sweep is an onomatopoeia, that imitate the sound of the wind.

There is an other alliteration dark and deep, in the fourteenth line.

And miles to go before I sleep is a repetition of the line, to focus the reader attention to the final of this poem, because is one of the first element you can see reading the poem..