Top-Rated Free Essay
Preview

Outline for the poem "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening"

Satisfactory Essays
331 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Outline for the poem "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening"
Patricia Rivera Conde y Castañeda
8/11/13

Outline

Imagery in the poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, the poet uses the contrasts of ideas and images to present the metaphors which will give the main theme and mood to the poem. Visual images and tactile images help to understand better the mood of the narrator along with creating a clear picture of the scenery of the poem in the reader’s mind. The poet uses personification to increase the tension in the middle of the poem in order for the reader to understand that there is some uncertainty in the narrator’s acts.

The poem talks about a man wondering around in the woods with his horse on a snowy evening, for a moment he stops and contemplates the scenery.

A) The poet uses mostly visual images in describing the scenery, such as “To watch his woods fill up with snow”, “The darkest evening of the year” and “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”. The effect that the poet creates with these images is the sense of tranquility and beauty that made the narrator be lulled by the woods.

B) We find metaphors used by the poet in the phrase “And miles to go before I sleep”, where “miles to go”, is the metaphor for life and “before I sleep”, is a metaphor for death. The repetition of this line at the end of the last stanza gives emphasis to the phrase giving a second meaning to the phrase, along with turning drastically the mood of the poem into something darker.

C) The poet uses personification in the horse, since he gives human character to the horse when it starts questioning its master decisions. The horse feels anxious and he even tries to awake his master of the trance he has sunk in. The fear of the horse brings tension to the poem along with the feeling of uncertainty.

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    As evident by the title of this poem, imagery is a strong technique used in this poem as the author describes with great detail his journey through a sawmill town. This technique is used most in the following phrases: “...down a tilting road, into a distant valley.” And “The sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards with perhaps a store”. This has the effect of creating an image in the reader’s mind and making the poem even more real.…

    • 2400 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The first line contains an image of a “bronze butterfly” sleeping on a trunk. This stagnant description of such a beautiful creature demonstrates a slowly moving life, one of which hasn’t achieved much. The trunk that the butterfly is sleeping on is colored black, representing the man’s missed opportunities to leave the farm. The next line portrays a leaf blowing down a ravine found behind an empty house. Obviously the empty house and the later heard cowbells in the distance (implying that the cows are leaving the farm) are clear images of the man’s loneliness. The speaker moves on to spot some horse manure. This dung, after being left for over a year, has dried and is turning into stones. The changing of this manure symbolizes the man’s changing into an old, lifeless man. Just as the manure does, the longer the man sits there and waits for something, the more prone he is to dry up and waste his life. Before the last line of the poem, the speaker mentions the setting sun and the evening that approaches as he lays back in his hammock. A chicken hawk, a well-known hunter, flies by the man and looks for his home, just as the man is looking for his home — or the place where he belongs. As the evening envelops the man, all of these apparently “beautiful” images (yet symbolically depressing messages) pushes the man to realize that his life has become…

    • 382 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The title of the poem “In the Park” immediately gives us an image of the geographical landscape in which the poem is set in and from further analysis, the poem is written…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The imagery of this poem surrounds a train and can represent the physical aspect towards the new world. It starts off straight away with the lines “It was sad to hear, the train’s whistle this morning” straight away using the feature of onomatopoeia, giving the train a more life-like attribute with the use of ‘whistle’ but also setting the tone of the poem towards a more negative tone using the word “sad”. The stanza continues to portray a sense of loss, sadness and hardship as they await the train with the line “All night it had rained” and has also used the lines “But we ate it all, the silence, the cold and the benevolence of empty streets” to symbolize the environment around them with the mood of the travelers, as the persona combines it with the oppressiveness of the migrants. All of this set the emotion of the poem and symbolizes all the experiences that the migrants go through. This helps portray how the train symbolized the next part of their journey and how at times how depressing their journey can be how the atmosphere around them is mostly gloomy and depressing.…

    • 804 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The most interesting poetic device found in the poem was the use of extended metaphor. It is evident in lines three to ten:…

    • 920 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author employs imagery throughout the poem by pairing vivid colors with other characters and figures to contribute to a more complex meaning. This visual imagery is found in line 3 when the speaker described…

    • 961 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The road essay

    • 1714 Words
    • 7 Pages

    This is a brief section of the book that really goes into the detail of what the landscape looks like. It is an intense description of how desolate the landscape really is. It talks about charcoal trees as if they had been sketched across the land. This excerpt from the book is a great example of imagery and how it lets the mind depict how the landscape looks.…

    • 1714 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    For the reader there should be several different moods that take place. The first of which is loneliness being in the woods by yourself Frost describe this as “and be one traveler, long I stood”. The reader gets the feeling of…

    • 794 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The speaker of this poem is explaining of what the night consist of in his opinion. In the first line, the speaker right away tells the readers that he well acquainted to the night. The speaker seems to have good knowledge of the night and also enjoys it, as what the reader can capture from the first line. In line 2 and 3 the speaker begins to explain about a journey him/her in a rainy night while leaving a city. The speaker is explaining of what a night consist of trough a walk through a rainy night leaving a particular city. It seems that he enjoys walking regularly in the night, a reason to belief that the speaker is well acquainted to the night, because walk and observe the night regularly. In the next stanza, line 4 to 6, the speaker says that he/she leave the city through the saddest lane of the city where he encounters a watchman, which he completely ignores. It is to say that the speaker is making a statement he/she does not care about a time…

    • 1065 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The illusion of the snowflakes and angels, created by the images in the poem, represents this person’s perceived reality. A drawing of a barren tree with the words “it was all an illusion” appears on a “horizontal line across midscreen” (Matanle qtd in de Barros 0:0:48 and 0:0:38). Often emotions can overtake rational thought which distorts reality. The bark of the tree, as well as the horizontal line, symbolizes this person’s need for stability in reality. The barren tree is much like the silhouette of the “person walking toward the tree” in that both lack stimulation, stability, and hope (de Barros 0:0:55).…

    • 382 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Poetry essay

    • 1065 Words
    • 3 Pages

    The poem begins by setting the mood. The setting is a cold winter’s day when they begin their journey. The symbolism for the coldness of the world as well as the coldness in men’s hearts is evident.…

    • 1065 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Desert Places

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages

    In the first stanza, the setting is developed with the use of words ‘night’ and ‘snow’ and they both carry negative connotation. Snow is employed throughout the poem to show the lack of identity; it also has characteristics of cold and formless white sheet. This observations show an image of snow falling fast, destroying the beauty of the field and covering up everything that is living. Similarly the ‘night’ has a negative connotation of darkness, the blackness and visionless that…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The poet uses imagery throughout the poem, evoking strong images in each stanza, and language that appeals to the senses. The first stanza uses an image of a "tree, or a wood". This natural image conjures a sense of freedom. It then moves to "a garden, or a magic city", evoking images of human tampering with nature, and the idea of large possibility.…

    • 505 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    "The woods are lovely, dark and deep," This line from the poem Stopping by woods, is saying that the woods are an opinionated place. The woods may be lovely to some, and scary to others. People may consider the woods to be lovely as they may have an interest for nature and it’s beauty. They may also like to see interesting animals, and escape from the reality of life. Some people might want to sit on a tree branch and enjoy the peace and quiet. To some people forests are a dark place, where they can escape to when they want to be alone. People may want to go to the woods to captivate their curious souls, and do something adventurous in the woodlands. Teenagers might want to play around and maybe even invite some friends to hang out with. The…

    • 257 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The playful boy in Birches is imaginary, he represents a younger version of Frost himself. The boy enjoyed swinging on the trees by “riding them over and over again / until he took the stiffness out of them”(30-31). This visual image illustrates the victory of the poet in moving to his own imaginary world where “you’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen”(13). In a study guide on Birches, it is claimed that “this line (13) signals the beginning of a retreat from reality” (Poetry for Students, Vol. 13). In addition, comparing the birches in the ice storm to “girls on hands and knees that throw their hair” (19) symbolizes the captive position of the speaker who is getting older as the Birches, year after year. Even though the poet feels free when he is a swinger of birches, he reached a statement that “Earth is the right place for love” (53); climbing the trees and knowing about coming back again is an example of escape and transcendence towards heaven. Identically, the speaker in “Stopping by Woods”, is watching “the woods fill up with snow” (4), the “frozen lake” (7) in an unfamiliar location. With a feeling of sadness, he wants to keep on contemplating the nature but many objects prevents him to do so; the farmhouse in the village where he belongs and the confused little horse. In fact, the speaker concluded in that wintery location that his horse must thought it was strange to stop there, so the animal shake his harness bells. Frost, in this image creates an auditory imagery to explain the soothing silence that made the speaker fleetingly forget about his…

    • 732 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays