Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening has a very clear literal meaning. However, there are many elements to the poem that can lead the reader to reading it allegorically. The need to look past a poems literal meaning comes from the associations readers make between words and other ideas. The elements which make up a poem can be used as tools to look beyond the literal meaning and on to a deeper meaning.
The literal meaning of Frost’s poem is obvious. A man is traveling through the woods on horseback and stops to admire the woods but realize he has many obligations and a long journey ahead before he can rest for the night. The speaker describes the woods as “lovely, dark, and deep” (13). The poem could be described in the same way. It is very pleasant but could also have a deeper-darker interpretation. You can not help but make the association between words like deep and dark to the idea of death. This his how Frost uses diction to bring out ...