[In the following essay, Frank provides a psychological interpretation of the speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”]

Like the snake, a poem may slough off some of its more overt meanings and survive brilliantly in a new skin. The first level interpretation of Robert Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” that of an exaltation of nature's beauty, has long since lost its allure; and the death-wish interpretation, too, has been overworked. It has recently been modified into a “little death” as opposed to the “big death” of the suicide wish. “… If there is any death in the poem,” writes Nat Henry, “… it is the little death of abnegation to which we sentence ourselves daily because of what we owe to those who depend on us …” (Explicator, 37, 1 [1978], 37-38).

It is the naïve tone of the speaker that leads us first to read the poem as an ode to the beauty of nature; surely nothing more sophisticated can be attributed to the simple farmer on his homeward journey. Only the line, “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep” (italics mine), alerts us in its yearning and its mystification of the woods to a death-wish the speaker does perhaps neither understand nor even discern.

To plumb the significance of the poem we must first abandon our reliance on the speaker's own insights; so long as we accept his analysis we are merely conspirators in evasion. No sooner, however, do we discredit the speaker than the poem's complexities and true pathos shine forth. For “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” embodies at least three facets of the American tragedy: the compulsive adherence to the work-ethic; the preoccupation with the dictates of society; and the terror of facing introspection. Because he cannot surmount any of these hurdles the speaker never stops to watch the woods fill up with snow. There is a before-stopping and there is an after-stopping; but the actual stopping to commune with nature and self never occurs. The poem's title, thus, becomes wryly ironic.

We meet the speaker worrying over who the owner of the woods is and then quickly assuring himself that “his house is in the village,” in the social world from which the speaker has temporarily strayed, and would not see him. The mere act of stopping here gains a criminal patina—what is it he should not be doing? Watching the woods fill up with snow! Shame and guilt seem to stem from the break in the work-ethic to indulge in socially frowned on, “unmanly,” emotions.

Although during the break between stanzas one and two, the speaker, reassured that he would go undetected, has stopped physically, he is still unable “to watch the woods fill up with snow” because he has now endowed his horse with the condemnation which he expects from society. The horse, not cursed with human guilt, is not likely to “think it queer / To stop without a farmhouse near”; had the horse not been there, the speaker would have endowed the owl or the groundhog in its hiding with disapproval of him. The unconscious use, by the speaker, of “queer,” meaning odd, is interesting too—evoking as it does a connotation of that other, pejorative sense of the word, “unmanly.”

The speaker enumerates now the reasons why he should not be stopping: the place is cold, dark, and deserted. The very reasons why the speaker did want to stop—the loneliness of the night, and the absence of social critic, now are offered as incentives to move on. Clearly the speaker is in conflict: the moment away from the world both calls, siren-like, and terrifies. It may seem to him that (just like the followers of the sirens) he would be drawn into death if he truly stopped; but we know that this is not so—through introspection and a fusion with the universe he would find life; and this is what he is, in fact, afraid of.

An objective truth begins the third stanza with the horse's shaking of its harness bells; yet the interpretation of the fact is immediately subjective and, as such, misguided: “To ask if there was some mistake.” Again the speaker's misgivings are projected onto the horse.

The second half of the third stanza suggests at first glance that the speaker has at last resolved his conflict and achieved his communion with nature. And yet not so: “The only other sound's the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake” (italics mine). The dominant sound is that of the harness bells; the sounds of nature are peripheral. The speaker clings to the social sound of the bells against the dizzying swirl of nature and the unconscious like someone atop a tower who, because of vertigo, cannot bear to look down, so instead, focuses his gaze on the railing.

And so, before he has stopped, truly stopped, before he has allowed himself to abandon the focal-point of the horse as an outpost of society, before he has communed with nature, he is already, in the last stanza, abandoning it: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” is not spoken in contemplation of the woods; it is a dismissal: “Oh, well, I know all about those lovely woods, BUT”—and the “but” explodes with great relief—“I have promises to keep.” This is the rationalization which permits the speaker to move on, allowing him to escape “honorably” from meeting up with himself.

Although it may be futile to speculate what would have been if he had stopped, it is clear that the speaker would then have come to understand his impulses and fears and, thus, would have shared our insights. As it is, we leave him as blind as we had found him, only feeling wiser ourselves. Call it dramatic irony.