Snow is falling, and a man has reined in his horse on the darkest evening of the year, before woods that belong to someone back in the village, someone who will never know he stopped here to watch them fill. That is the whole event: a halt, a hush, no errand and no reason, only the pull of something lovely, dark and deep that asks for nothing and offers, in the same breath, rest and the kind of rest there is no waking from. Frost lets the rhyme do the seducing, each stanza handing its odd line forward into the next like a held breath, the snow and the meter coming down at the same pace. Then the turn, said twice: promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep. He speaks it once as plain fact and once as a man talking himself back onto the road, and under that second saying you can hear how much of him wanted to stay in the snow.