Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening / Robert Frost



"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is a poem written in 1922 by Robert Frost, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume. Imagery and personification are prominent in the work. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it "my best bid for remembrance".

Overview
Frost wrote this poem about winter in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont that is now home to the "Robert Frost Stone House Museum". Frost 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 of a chain rhyme is the terza rima used in Dante's Inferno.) Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.

In popular culture
American composer Randall Thompson included "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" as one of the seven pieces in his choral work, "Frostiana: Seven Country Songs," which was originally performed with Thompson conducting and with Frost in attendance. All of these pieces were based upon texts by Robert Frost, including such works as "The Road Not Taken" and "Choose Something Like A Star". Another choral interpretation of this poem, titled "Sleep", was written several decades later by Eric Whitacre, a contemporary American composer whose other choral works include "Lux Aurumque", "When David Heard", "Winter", and others. Due to copyright reasons, the text of the composition was re-written by Charles Anthony Silvestri to comply with the wishes of the Robert Frost estate.

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 favorite 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 (October 3, 2000), his eldest son Justin rephrased the last line of this poem in his eulogy to his father. "...The woods are lovely, dark and deep. He has kept his promises and earned his sleep."

The poem has also been included in a number of films and television shows, including an episode of The Sopranos, where Meadow explains the poem's meaning to her brother, AJ, an episode of Home Movies, where Coach McGuirk talks to Brendon about poetry and makes reference to Frost and this poem, and the "Safe Haven" episode of Criminal Minds. Films that have used the poem include the 1977 film Telefon. , the 2003 film Dreamcatcher, and Quentin Tarantino's 2007 movie, Death Proof. .