In the early morning of November 23, 1963, Sid Davis of Westinghouse Broadcasting reported the arrival of President John F. After his death, another editor (re)inserted it, in what critic Evan Lang Pandya calls a 'gross besmirching of Frost's intention that has gone down as one of twentieth-century editing's foremost quibbles.' Notable usage Frost is said to have ordered that it be removed. As can be seen (and as is pointed out by English literature teachers), the presence of the comma makes a significant change in the meaning of the line: 'the woods are lovely because they are dark and deep' becomes 'the woods are lovely, and dark, and deep'. Comma story Īn oft-repeated story holds that Frost wrote the first line of the last stanza without an Oxford comma: 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep' and an editor or typesetter added a comma: 'The woods are lovely, dark, and deep'. As the narrator's thought is disrupted by the horse in the third stanza, a hard g is used. In the second stanza, harder sounds - like k and qu - begin to break the whisper. The poem begins with a moment of quiet introspection, which is reflected in the soft sounds of w's and th's, as well as double ll's. Overall, the rhyme scheme is AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD. Each verse (save the last) follows an AABA rhyming scheme, with the following verse's A line rhyming with that verse's B line, which is a chain rhyme (another example is the terza rima used in Dante's Inferno). The poem is written in iambic tetrameter in the Rubaiyat stanza created by Edward FitzGerald, who adopted the style from Hakim Omar Khayyam, the 12th-century Persian poet and mathematician. 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.' Structure and style He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening'. He had been up the entire night writing the long poem 'New Hampshire' from the poetry collection of the same name, and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. It ends with him reminding himself that, despite the loveliness of the view, 'I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.'įrost wrote the poem in June 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont.

The text of the poem reflects the thoughts of a lone wagon driver (the narrator), pausing at dusk in his travel to watch snow falling in the woods. In a letter to Louis Untermeyer, Frost called it 'my best bid for remembrance'. Imagery, personification, and repetition are prominent in the work.

' Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' is a poem by Robert Frost, written in 1922, and published in 1923 in his New Hampshire volume.

Robert frost the woods poem