The Poem Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening Essays - Rhyme

The Poem Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening The Poem Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening This poem is layered with different meanings and it requires the reader to contemplate Frosts emotions behind the words. Like most of Frost's poems, Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening can be read on several level yet you can ignore them all and still enjoy the surface meaning. On the surface of this poem, its talking about a man traveling through the woods with his horse and they stop near someones house. The horse wants the man to continue but he wants to stay. Being in the woods causes the man to reflect on the larger tensions between duty; his promises to keep(13) and the desire to do what he wants. However, in order to fully understand the emotions and the deeper meanings within this poem, well analyze these three aspects of the poem: images, rhythms and meanings. This entire poem uses words that paint very vivid images of gorgeous winter, lovely dark woods and peacefulness, which inside causes a certain friction or tension. Also there is a sense of darkness in the poem, such as in the darkest evening of the year(8) and The woods are lovely, dark and deep(16). And the fact that the poem takes place in the isolated woods, there is a certain quality of peacefulness and stillness being portrayed as in the frozen lake(12) and The only other sounds the sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake(11-12). Between the woods and frozen lake(7). This notion of being in between those two things is a significant tension in the poem. Therefore without these exact words, this poem could lack several layers of meaning and emotion. Just below the surface there is the sleep/death metaphor, and the undercurrent of gentle longing for death tinges the surface with a melancholy that reinforces and plays off the night and winter images. But the imagery of the poem quoted ab ove creates in the reader the actual feelings of peace, beauty and tension; these actual feelings make up a range of experience entirely different from the experience of the rational thought that sums up the poem. All stanzas have a regular rhyme scheme of the last word of the first, second and fourth lines in each stanza (AABA, BBCB, etc.) except for the last stanza, which is all in the same rhyme (DDDD). Besides that, the last word from the third line rhymes with the following stanzas lines one, two and four. These perfect rhymes and rhythms lend itself to the light restful feel of the poem. Frosts choice of written words are much like spoken English which lends itself to the conversational feel that his poems have. Form wise, note the predominance of soft, sibilant sounds, evoking the sweep of easy wind and downy flake(11-12). Also the sounds associated with nature in the poem all sound soothing, such as sweep(11) and deep(13) which suggests further that the woods is a place of refuge for the man. The change in rhyme in the final stanza gives us a clue about the shift in the content, too. The shift comes at a point in the poem when we might expect an insight or answer to the question the po em poses, but the same rhyme throughout this final stanza suggests instead that the man is still thinking or still asking the questions. In addition, the final two lines repeat one another, which also suggests that a problem or tension still exists, that the poem doesnt completely provide resolution. Every word has a key role in the deeper meaning of the poem. Normally poems are shorter than other works. This makes each word of a poem extremely significant. Frosts major meaning seemed to be that one should take time to stop and notice the beauty around us but not to dawdle and dwell too long, as there is much to do in a lifetime. In the first stanza, To watch his woods fill up with snow(4), we see a man stopping in the forest to watch it fill up with snow. Here, the woods in the poem symbolize death. The woods and death are both looked at as very cold