Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

Despite the deceptive simplicity of the language, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” consists of four stanzas written in a rigid interlocking Rubaiyat form. This type of poetry is made up of an unlimited number of quatrains, or four-line stanzas, in iambic tetrameter with a fixed repeating rhyme scheme.

In a traditional Rubaiyat poem, each line will be exactly 10 syllables, following the iambic pentameter rhythm. However, Frost’s poem deviated by using tetrameter, or eight-syllable lines. Like a traditional Rubaiyat, the first two lines and the fourth line of the first stanza all rhyme. In the second stanza, the first two lines and the fourth line will rhyme with the third line of the first stanza. That pattern will continue as the first, second, and fourth line of the third stanza rhyme with the third line of the second stanza, and so forth. Thus, the rhyme scheme is as follows:

AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD

The only deviation to the classic form is the length of the lines, as noted above, and the final rhyming quatrain with its double repeated lines at the very end, though the seamless rhythm is maintained throughout.