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Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening




Frost wrote this poem about winter in June, 1922 at his house in Shaftsbury, Vermont that is now home to the "Robert Frost Stone House Museum." Frost had been up the entire night writing the long poem "New Hampshire" and had finally finished when he realized morning had come. He went out to view the sunrise and suddenly got the idea for "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He wrote the new poem in just a few minutes and later stated that "It was as if I'd had a hallucination."

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" was Frost's favorite of his own poems and Frost in a letter to Louis Untermeyer called it "my best bid for remembrance."

The poem is written in Iambic Tetrameter . Each verses follows an '' A-a-b-a '' rhyming scheme, with the following verse's a's rhyming with that verse's b:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.


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The Last stanza of the poem (with an alteration of the wording) was recited in ''Death Proof'', Quentin Tarantino 's segment from '' Grindhouse ''.
The poem was mentioned in The Sopranos episode entitled Proshai, Livushka .

The final verse of this poem plays a prominent role in the 1977 film '' Telefon '', acting as a post-hypnotic trigger for sleeper KGB agents in the United States. It is also the closing voice-over comment of the 2003 movie '' 16 Years Of Alcohol ''.


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