Analyze "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.

"Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" continues a long tradition of nature poems in which a speaker captures a moment of quiet joy. It is short, it uses simple language, and it is lyrical—it expresses emotion.
In the poem, the narrator recalls a time in which he was so struck by the beauty of the snow falling at night in a woods that he simply stopped and enjoyed the scene. The poem's theme is the importance of taking the time out to experience the powerful but fleeting moments of beauty in the world. A second theme is the poet's deep longing to have more time in his life to enjoy such simple moments of stillness and joy.
The poem turns on an implicit comparison between the speaker's normally busy and hurried life and the deeply peaceful, even holy experience of watching the snow fall silently in a dark woods. We know this stopping is out of the ordinary for the speaker because his horse shakes his harness bells, wondering why they are not moving. We understand, too, that the speaker normally has a busy life because of the plaintive, repeated refrain:

And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

The speaker experiences a liminal space outside of his ordinary life, and his soul is deeply touched by the experience.
The poem has an effortless feeling of simplicity, and yet is highly structured, with an AABA rhyme scheme that alters to AAAA in the last line. It creates a comforting sense of rhythm with its even iambic tetrameter meter. The complexity underneath its seeming simplicity echoes the speaker's complex emotional response to a seemingly simple snowfall, which comes to symbolize for him all the moments of beauty he normally rushes past.