`Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', like many of Frost's poems can be read on many different levels. The surface meaning is often a wonderfully evocative scene of nature with many deeper sublevels. In this poem we see the absence of simile and metaphor but a clear use of extended imagery. The traveller in the poem has stopped his horse in a desolate landscape; it appears his only bond with the outside world is his horse. The traveller seems to be aware that his impulse is out of place, he acknowledges that his horse knows the folly of this respite, he pursues this idea, seemingly adding reason to why he shouldn't stop, he is `between the woods and frozen lake' on what he describes as `the darkest evening of the year'.

In the first stanza the inverted...