If read lightly, this poem may easily be taken as a simple description of the scenery, made by a lone traveller at night. But through the usage of the lexical fields of winter and loneliness, Frost leads us to the question of the reader’s state of mind, wether he is just stopping by the woods to gaze at the landscape, or wether the woods are a metaphor of death.

This poem’s structure only leads to assume that the first layer of Frost’s text is what was initially meant. Composed of four stanzas of four iambic tetrameter each and mainly monosyllabic, this poem reminds the rythm of a song, easy to understand and to remember. Going with this idea, the speaker would be a traveller who loves nature, the ‘lovely, dark and deep’ woods, just stopping here to look at this beautiful winter scene.

But if looking at the lexical fields and disposition of the stanzas, it is a whole different story. The stanzas’ order could be generalized as following ; the first is the stop, the second and third are the horse’s intervention and the last one is the continuation of the speaker’s route. As for the lexical fields, the winter, the last season, represents the death of vegetation and the end of the year. This winter  is expressed here by the falling snow and the cold of the ‘frozen lake’ on this ‘darkest evening of the year’, which reminds of the burial cloth of death, covering up the life (the woods).

The other main lexical field is the one of loneliness. As expressed in the second stanza, the speaker and his horse are in the middle of nowhere and the odd fact here is the personnification of the aformentionned horse, which thinks it ‘queer’ to stop here. The loneliness of the speaker is explained by the fact that there     is no one around, the surroundings are so calm that he even hears the sound     of ‘downy flake’. The silence and the night are both generators of this feeling, thus the speaker is alone in the dark, except for his horse. Ending his poem     by the impression of the woods on the mind of the speaker, Frost made him continue his way until this speaker has done what is expected of him.

Thus, this poem is a metaphor of what is left to someone who made a choice and has to see it to an end, the ‘promises to keep’. The poem begins with a guess of the speaker, he thinks he knows the owner of the woods, even if he knows for sure where his/her house is. This assumption at the beginning reinforces the question of the poem’s global meaning, wether it is simple or an advanced metaphor of life and death. The woods ‘[filling] up with snow ‘ would be the life being covered up by the shroud of death. The intervention of the horse would be a burst of the speaker’s conscience when he is gazing at the possibility of giving up to the Death. But then it gives a ‘shake’ to his harness, the mind of the speaker and brings him back to reality. Even if he is tired, this speaker has to go, to keep his promises before finally going to sleep.