Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening Quiz

Answer: Man

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though"

This poem has a typical a-a-b-a rhyme. To hear this, repeat the first four line's last words: know, though, here and snow. This rhyming scheme is called iambic tetrameter.

Answer: The village

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though."

This poem is one of Frost's more popular poems, and was published in 1923 in "New Hampshire." "New Hampshire" was a Pulitzer Prize winning book containing other popular poems, such are "Fire and Ice" and "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Answer: To see the woods fill up with snow

"He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow."

John T. Ogilvie says this about this poem: "What appears to be "simple" is shown to be not really simple, what appears to be innocent not really innocent.... The poet is fascinated and lulled by the empty wastes of white and black. The repetition of "sleep" in the final two lines suggests that he may succumb to the influences that are at work. There is no reason to suppose that these influences are benignant. It is, after all, "the darkest evening of the year," and the poet is alone "between the woods and frozen lake." His one bond with the security and warmth of the "outer" world, the "little horse" who wants to be about his errand, is an unsure one. The ascription of "lovely" to this scene of desolate woods, effacing snow, and black night complicates rather than alleviates the mood when we consider how pervasive are the connotations of dangerous isolation and menacing death."

From "From Woods to Stars: A Pattern of Imagery in Robert Frost's Poetry." South Atlantic Quarterly. Winter 1959.

Answer: A little horse

"My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near"

From Reuben A. Brower: "The very tentative tone of the opening line lets us into the mood without our quite sensing where it will lead, just as the ordinariness of 'though' at the end of the second line assures us that we are in this world. But by repeating the 'o' sound, 'though' also starts the series of rhymes that will soon get the better of traveler and reader. The impression of aloneness in the first two lines prepares for concentration on seeing the strange process not of snow falling, but of woods 'filling up.' The intimacy of

'My little horse must think it queer'

reminds us again of the everyday man and his life back home, but 'queer' leads to an even lonelier scene, a kind of northern nowhere connected with the strangeness of the winter solstice,

The darkest evening of the year."

The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. Copyright © 1963

Answer: A farmhouse

"My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near"

Richard Poirier: "As its opening words suggest--"Whose woods these are I think I know"--it is a poem concerned with ownership and also with someone who cannot be or does not choose to be very emphatic even about owning himself. He does not want or expect to be seen. And his reason, aside from being on someone else's property, is that it would apparently be out of character for him to be there, communing alone with a woods fast filling up with snow. He is, after all, a man of business who has promised his time, his future to other people. It would appear that he is not only a scheduled man but a fairly convivial one. He knows who owns which parcels of land, or thinks he does, and his language has a sort of pleasant neighborliness, as in the phrase "stopping by." It is no wonder that his little horse would think his actions "queer" or that he would let the horse, instead of himself, take responsibility for the judgment."

Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Copyright © 1977

Answer: Woods

"Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year."

Guy Rotella: "The monosyllabic tetrameter declares itself as it declares. Yet the "sound of sense" is uncertain. As an expression of doubtful guessing, "think" opposes "know," with its air of certitude. The line might be read to emphasize doubt (Whose woods these are I think I know) or confident knowledge (Whose woods these are I think I know). Once the issue is introduced, even a scrupulously "neutral" reading points it up. The evidence for choosing emphasis is insufficient to the choice."

"Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg and Bohr." In On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991.

Answer: No

"Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year."

George Montiero: "In "the darkest evening of the year," the New England poet finds himself standing before a scene he finds attractive enough to make him linger. Frost's poem employs, significantly; the present tense. Dante's poem (through Longfellow) employs the past tense. It is as if Frost were casually remembering some familiar engraving that hung on a schoolroom wall in Lawrence as he was growing up in the 1880s, and the poet slides into the picture. He enters, so to speak, the mind of the figure who speaks the poem, a figure whose body is slowly turned into the scene, head fully away from the foreground, bulking small, holding the reins steadily and loosely. The horse and team are planted, though poised to move."

Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988

Answer: The little horse

"He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake."

Jeffrey Meyers: "The most amazing thing about this work is that three of the fifteen lines (the last line repeats the previous one) are transformations from other poems. "He gives his harness bells a shake" comes from Scott's "The Rover" (in Palgrave): "He gave the bridle-reins a shake.: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep" comes from Thomas Lovell Beddoes' "The Phantom Wooer": "Our bed is lovely, dark, and sweet." The concluding "And miles to go before I sleep" comes from Keats' "Keen Fitful Gusts": "And I have many miles on foot to fare." Though these three lines are variations from other poets, Frost, writing in the tradition of English verse, makes them original and new, and integrates them perfectly into his own poem."

Robert Frost: A Biography. Copyright © 1996

Answer: To ask if there is some mistake

"He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake."

Richard Gray: "This contrast between what might be termed, rather reductively perhaps, 'realistic' and 'romantic' attitudes is then sustained through the next two stanzas: the commonsensical response is now playfully attributed to the narrator's horse which, like any practical being, wants to get on down the road to food and shelter. The narrator himself, however, continues to be lured by the mysteries of the forest just as the Romantic poets were lured by the mysteries of otherness, sleep and death. And, as before, the contrast is a product of tone and texture as much as dramatic intimation: the poem communicates its debate in how it says things as much as in what it says. So, the harsh gutturals and abrupt movement of lines like, 'He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake', give verbal shape to the matter-of-fact attitude attributed to the horse, just as the soothing sibilants and gently rocking motion of the lines that follow this ('The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake') offer a tonal equivalent of the strange, seductive world into which the narrator is tempted to move. 'Everything that is written', Frost once said, 'is as good as it is dramatic'; and in a poem like this the words of the poem become actors in the drama."

American Poetry of the Twentieth Century. Copyright © 1990

Answer: False

"The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake."

William H. Pritchard: "Discussion of this poem has usually concerned itself with matters of "content" or meaning (What do the woods represent? Is this a poem in which suicide is contemplated?). Frost, accordingly, as he continued to read it in public made fun of efforts to draw out or fix its meaning as something large and impressive, something to do with man's existential loneliness or other ultimate matters. Perhaps because of these efforts, and on at least one occasion--his last appearance in 1962 at the Ford Forum in Boston--he told his audience that the thing which had given him most pleasure in composing the poem was the effortless sound of that couplet about the horse and what it does when stopped by the woods: "He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake." We might guess that he held these lines up for admiration because they are probably the hardest ones in the poem out of which to make anything significant: regular in their iambic rhythm and suggesting nothing more than they assert, they establish a sound against which the "other sound" of the following lines can, by contrast, make itself heard."

Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Copyright © 1984

Answer: Yes

"The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake."

Derek Walcott: ""Whose woods these are I think I know." He does know, so why the hesitancy? Certainly, by the end of the line, he has a pretty good guess. No, the subject is not the ownership of the woods, the legal name of their proprietor, it is the fear of naming the woods, of the anthropomorphic heresy or the hubris of possession by owners and poets.

The next line, generally read as an intoned filler for the rhymes, and also praised for the regionality of that "though" as being very American, is a daring, superfluous, and muted parenthesis. "His house is in the village though." Why not? Why shouldn't he live in the woods? What is he scared of? Of possession, of the darkness of the world in the woods, from his safe world of light and known, named things. He's lucky, the frightened poem says while I'm out here in the dark evening with the first flakes of snow beginning to blur my vision and causing my horse to shudder, shake its reins, and ask why we have stopped. The poem darkens with terror in every homily."

"The Road Taken." In Brodsky, Joseph, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott (eds.) Homage to Robert Frost. New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux, 1996.

Answer: Lovely

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,"

Karen L. Kilcup: "Once again we can trace the emotional resonance of Frost's poem back to the concrete situation that helped engender it. Shortly before Christmas of 1905, Frost had made an unsuccessful trip into town to sell eggs in order to raise money for his children's Christmas presents. "Alone in the driving snow, the memory of his years of hopeful but frustrated struggle welled up, and he let his long-pent feelings out in tears." The intensity of this tearful moment translates into the affective content that permeates but never overwhelms "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The fact that the poem would be written seventeen years after the moment that it reflected testifies to the deep suffering that this experience engendered; too painful to be dwelt upon, it would be only with time and distance that the emotions of that awful moment could be balanced, in a "momentary stay against confusion," by the comforting restraint of formal expression."

Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998

Answer: true

"The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,"

Mark Richardson: "The idea that the "inner" materials of the artist are "re-formed" by the "outer" materials in which he works helps us understand the implications of the reading of "Stop- ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" given by Frost himself in "The Constant Symbol." Much commentary on "Stopping by Woods" has suggested that the poem expresses a complicated desire for self-annihilation. The idea is well handled by Richard Poirier in 'Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing': "The recognition of the power of nature, especially of snow, to obliterate the limits and boundaries of things and of his own being is, in large part, a function here of some furtive impulse toward extinction, an impulse no more predominate in Frost than in nature" (181). Frank Lentricchia makes a similar point about Frost's winter landscapes in general and quotes an especially apposite passage from Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space: "In the outside world, snow covers all tracks, blurs the road, muffles every sound, conceals all colors. As a result of this universal whiteness, we feel a form of cosmic negation in action" (qtd. in Lentricchia, Landscapes 31)."

The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Copyright © 1997

Answer: Because he still has miles to go

"And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

Thomas C. Harrison: "Diphthongs, two vowels at a time....What happens in the poem happens in the last two lines of this stanza, leading to "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," where the speaker is about to fall face-first into the snow. Start with "only," with tense vowel followed by nasal and liquid. "Sound's" begins with a sibilant fricative, followed by a diphthong, followed by a consonant cluster ndz, nasal, stop, and fricative. In the last line, "easy" has a tense vowel and fricative, and "downy" a diphthong followed by a nasal.

Add to these effects those of alliteration ("only other," "sound's [. . .] sweep") and assonance ("sound's [. . .] downy," "sweep [. . .] easy"), and the poem, which has been moving along at a fairly brisk pace, stops attentive readers--especially those reading aloud--and squeezes them through a dense sieve of sound. Then we are almost ready to fall into the snow with the speaker."

The Explicator 59.1 (Fall 2000)

Answer: 1

It is written twice, which means there is a single repetition.

"And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep."

Clint Stevens: "Richard Poirier has marked that "woods" is mentioned four times in the poem. Along with this the reader will note that "I" is mentioned five times. These two realities, the subjective and the objective, are merged over the course of the poem. Such that, while the speaker focuses almost exclusively on the physical fact of his surroundings, he is at the same time articulating his own mental landscape, which seems ever-intent "to fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget." There is in the end the uncertainty in choosing between his death impulse and his desire to continue on the road of life. Which wins in the end, I think I know, but it scarcely matters; the speaker has had his solitary vision; whether he stays or goes, the woods will go with him and the reader, who are now well-acquainted with the coming night."

Copyright © 2003 Clint Stevens

All of the criticisms came from the quotes sources, which are consolidated at http://www.english.uiuc.edu/MAPS/poets/a_f/frost/woods.htm