Write a Critical appreciation of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" is one of the most moving of Frost's lyrics. It moves us as unobtrusively as it conveys to us the profundity of its thought. It is one of Frost's best-known poems, and one of the best-known poems of the twentieth century. Here as in "Desert places", a snowy scene is viewed by the speaker as he moves past at s night. It is the basic image of the poem. The scene makes some deep appeal to the traveller and discuss about Critical appreciation of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening .

It is a poem of superb craftsmanship. On a surface reading, It appears to be simple, descriptive record of minute observation, a scries of homely but vivid pictures. On a critical scrutiny of the poem, layers of meanings are unfolded before us. The poem achieves its climax of responsibility in the last stanza-the promises to be kept, the obligations to be fulfilled. Finding difficult words in the poem is a Herculean task because the poet has used the simplest vocabulary that comes handy even to the common reader. Almost all the words used in the poem are monosyllabic or disyllabic. The over simplicity is only a contrasting encrustation for the profound reality that it really suggests. This is a deeply meditative poem. The poem is a rare blend of homely music and significance.

According to Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"  contains "all I ever knew." Of the swift spurt which delivered the poem he says: "Easy does it." (He indicates a similar reaction to "Dust of Snow". He first called it "The Favour" because it was one of those things that had come to him as a favour, a favour from nature. These.Nature favours served as inceptor of poems.) "Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening" is, he says, "a series of almost reckless comimitments. I feel good in having guarded it so. It is my heavy-duty poem to be examined for rime or pairs"

This poem has a similarity with Longfellow's translation of Dante. In this poem Frost brings (as in "The Road Not Taken") the motifs of risk and decision characterizing both "The Choice of the Two Paths" and Dante's Inferno.

In the first stanza we find the poet to stop his horse in front of an unknown forest. The owner of the forest is absent from the scene. Throughout the poem we get 'realistic' and 'romantic' attitudes to life. It 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. So, the harsh 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 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.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" provides a doorway into an understanding of the poet's great popularity with "ordinary" readers. This poem is very popular because it contains a great truth in casy and realistic language. Perhaps the first thing we notice is that the poem is an interior manologue. The first line establishes the tone of a person musing quietly to himself on the situation before him: "Whose woods these are I think i know." He stops by the woods in "the darkest evening of the year"; the point in time poised between the day and the night, between consciousness and unconsciousness, between waking and sleeping, between life and oblivion. There is a slight lack of surety in the speaker saying to himself, "I think I know"; thus again signifying the meeting ground between what he knows and what he does not. These antimonies, his lack of certainty, and the muted sense of passion provide the tension by which the poem operates. The overall tone of the poem is serious and philosophical. By using the first person narrative the poet has made the poem personal. Moreover, the poet has tried to bring warmth of personal rapport by using the colloquial tone and dramatic beginning. However, the mysterious wood and the death like environment have added one kind of  objectivity in the tone of the poem. The fifst line consists entirely of monosyllables. Typically, monosyllabic lines are difficult to scan Frost wrote the poem almost  entirely in monosyllables and it demonstrates his technical perfection, as the poem scans in perfect iambic tetrameter. And so, any lack of certainty we might first suspect is smoothed over by this regular rhythm. Frost, likewise, stabilizes the poem by the rhyme scheme of aaba bbcb h ccdc dddd, without a single forced rhyme. This combination of regular rhythms and rhymes produces a pleasant hypnotic effect, which only increases which only increases as the poem progresses. The poem moves from a more conversational tone to the charming effect that characterizes the ending.The language indeed demonstrates this change: we move from the colloquial "His house is in the village though" to the poetic "The woods  are lovely. dark and deep/But I have promises to keep".