A traveller pauses at the edge of darkening woods as snow fills the spaces between the trees and the evening deepens toward silence. Frost wrote this poem in 1922, claiming it came in a single draft after a long night's work, and its apparent simplicity conceals a mystery that has never been resolved. The little horse shakes his harness bells. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. The repetition of the final line creates a cadence that hovers between restfulness and something far more final, a longing for stillness set against the obligations pulling the living forward. Built on the speech rhythms of rural New England, the resonance is universal. Promises and miles: the burden of every consciousness tempted, even for a moment, to stop.