Stopping by the Wood - Robert Frost

STOPPING BY THE WOOD ON THE SNOWY EVENING. Robert Frost’s well-known poem, “Stopping by The Wood on the Snowy Evening”. Frost was born in San Francisco, where he spent his first eleven years. After the death of his father, a journalist, he moved with his mother and sister to Western Massachusetts near to his paternal grandparents. He wrote his first poem while a student at Lawrence High School, from which he graduated as co-valedictorian …

…on the darkest evening of the year. The poet is powerfully drawn to these woods and like Hans Castorp in the “Snow” Chapter of Mann’s Magic Mountain : wants to lie down and let the snow cover and bury him. The third quatrain, with its drowsy, dream like line: “Of easy wind and downy flake”, opposes the horse instinctive urge for home with the man’s subconscious desire for death in the dark, snowy woods.