Verb Tenses Another crucial aspect of the diction in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is the fact that the entire poem is spoken in the present tense. For example, line 1: ‘Whose woods these are I think I know’. This choice of tense has two important and powerful effects on the impact and meaning of the poem:
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Continuous use of the present tense creates a strong sense of vividness and immediacy. This is because it seems as if the speaker is reporting events ‘live’ and as they happen. For example, ‘My horse gives his harness bells a shake’.
- The second important effect of the use of only the present tense is that it makes it impossible for us to know the outcome of the poem. For instance, we know that the speaker has ‘promises to keep’, but we have no way of knowing whether or not he kept them, because the poem has no ‘past’!
Rhyme and Rhythm Complementing and reinforcing its simple, present tense diction, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” also has an extremely regular rhythm and a deliberately repetitive rhyme scheme:
- In stanza 1: Lines 1, 2 and 4 all rhyme (‘know’, ‘though’, ‘snow’), and only line 3 (‘here’) does not rhyme.
- But line 3 of stanza 1 becomes the rhyme sound for the first, second and fourth lines of stanza 2: ‘queer’, ‘near’, ‘year’.
- This format is repeated in stanza 3: the first, second and fourth lines rhyme (‘shake’, ‘mistake’, ‘flake’) and the third line (‘sweep’) does not rhyme but it becomes the rhyme sound for stanza 4 (‘deep’, ‘keep’, ‘sleep’, ‘sleep’).
- Unlike the previous three stanzas, the final stanza is odd because every line has the same rhyme.
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.
One effect of the highly repetitive rhyme scheme (i.e. a [aaba bbcb ccdc dddd] rhyme scheme) is to make each of the four stanzas a neat 4-line unit, with its own, almost completely self-contained, rhyme pattern. The purpose of the single, ‘odd-line-out’ in each stanza (always the third line) is to provide a point of linkage and continuity between one stanza and the next.
Because each stanza is so enclosed, the poem falls into four distinct ‘episodes’ or ‘scenes’:
- Stanza 1: The scene in stanza 1 combines the evocation of the speaker’s ‘psychological’/ ‘inner’ landscape, with the description of the physical setting. This is because it evokes both the anti-social mental state of the speaker, and what he is watching in this mood – the woods, filling ‘up with snow’.
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Stanza 2: Stanza 2 focuses on (what the speaker imagines to be?) the horse’s worried viewpoint. This unusual perspective is highlighted by the rhyme words ‘queer’, ‘near’ and ‘year’. These three words emphasise the horse’s anxiety (‘queer’), and his two good reasons for being concerned: there is no ‘farmhouse near, and it is the darkest night of the ‘year’.
- Stanza 3: Stanza 3 then describes what the horse does because of its fear. The opening couplet (‘shake’, ‘mistake’, lines 9 – 10) pairs the nervous movement the horse makes with his bells, with the reason why he shakes them – his master’s ‘mistake’. But the third rhyme word, ‘flake’ (line 12), suggests that the ‘only other’ sound, the falling snow, somehow drowns out the horse’s jingling bells.
- Stanza 4: In the three previous stanzas, in terms of sound, the only thing which prevented each stanza being completely isolated was that each one had an ‘odd’ third line which did not rhyme with every other line in the same stanza, but introduced the rhyme in the next stanza instead.
But in stanza 4: For the first – and only – time every line rhymes: ‘deep’, ‘keep’, ‘sleep’, ‘sleep’. The fact that every line rhymes in the final stanza gives a finality to the poem which has come to an end. The purpose is quite obvious: the poet has come to the end of his poem but what is more important is that although he deeply regrets that he must move on (because he has a promise to keep), he still has a long way to go before he can break for sleep. Though he would love to take his time to enjoy the night, he must, however, gather his meandering thoughts and move on.
