Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

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.

Musical settings

1 setting of this poem. Listen, read the notes, get a feel for what each one argues.

• Version 1

  The poem's surface is so smooth it has fooled generations of readers into mistaking it for a postcard. A musical setting has to decide whether to reinforce that smoothness or rough it up. This setting honors the poem's restraint: it does not try to dramatize the speaker's hesitation at the woods' edge into something operatic. Instead, the arrangement is built around the doubled final line — "And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep" — which Frost famously refused to gloss. The setting lets the repetition do its own work. The interlocking aaba-bbcb-ccdc-dddd rhyme scheme that Frost said he had never seen and never tried again creates a sense of forward motion that the music either rides or stalls; either choice is an interpretive argument about the poem.