SOURCE: Rotella, Guy. “Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg, and Bohr.” In On Frost: The Best from American Literature, edited by Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd, pp. 147–169. Durham: Duke University, 1991.

In the following excerpt, Rotella discusses the balancing of opposites and “indeterminacy” in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stages its play of opposites at typically Frostian borders between night and day, storm and hearth, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility. It works them, not “out” to resolution but in permanent suspension as complementary counters in mens animi, the feeling thought of active mind. The poem is made to make the mind just that. It unsettles certitude even in so small a matter as the disposition of accents in the opening line: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” The monosyllabic tetrameter declares itself...