‘And Miles to Go Before I Sleep’: Robert Frost’s Haunting Line

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

One thing which many readers of Robert Frost’s poetry may have wondered while reading his poems is: why does he repeat the same line at the end of his 1923 poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’?

The repeated line ‘And miles to go before I sleep’ concludes what is probably Robert Frost’s second best-known poem. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is, after ‘The Road Not Taken’, Robert Frost’s most widely anthologised and oft-quoted poem.

Opening lines often attain a fame which the rest of the poem which they begin fails to achieve. Everyone knows ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, but how many people could quote the last line of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18? And how many people can go beyond ‘April is the cruellest month’ and tell you precisely what completes that opening sentence of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?

But Frost, if anything, had the opposite gift: he could close a poem like few other modern poets, and many of his most celebrated and cherished lines come towards the end of his poems, rather than at the start.

‘And miles to go before I sleep’ is one of the finest examples of this ‘art of closing’ which Frost had.

What’s the Poem About?

‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is spoken by a man who rides by some woods one evening during winter. He tells us that he thinks a man who owns the woods lives in the village some distance away.

Frost concludes ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ by telling us that, as inviting as the woods are, he has commitments elsewhere that he must honour, so he reluctantly needs to leave this place of peace and tranquillity and continue on his journey before he can sleep for the night.

To interpret and perceive its deeper meaning, we need to consider the wider context of the poem.

Rhyme and Reason

Frost’s poem has a highly unusual and controlled rhyme scheme, and understanding this helps us to appreciate the significance with which that final line, ‘And miles to go before I sleep’, is laden.

For he doesn’t just employ a rhyme scheme: he links each stanza to the next through repeating the same rhymes at different points in the succeeding stanza.

So, although we might say that the rhyme scheme is aaba, this only goes so far towards acknowledging the intricate way in which the stanzas are linked together. In other words, what would be a rhyme scheme of aaba ccdc eefe gghg is instead interlinked as aaba bbcb ccdc dddd.

Just four different rhymes are used, compared with the eight we’d get if each stanza’s rhymes were truly standalone.

So in the first stanza, we get aaba (‘know … though … here … snow’), but in the second stanza, we don’t get a get bbcb (‘queer … near … lake … near’); and then, in the third stanza, the ‘lake’ rhyme is shifted to become the ‘main’ rhyme, so we get ccdc (shake … mistake … sweep … flake).

In other words, the rhyme in the third line of each stanza becomes the rhyme of the first, second, and fourth lines in the next stanza. This lends the poem a sense of forward momentum, but at the same time, an air of inevitability, even world-weariness.

That Final Stanza

But this cannot go on indefinitely, and in the final stanza the third line ends with the same rhyme as the other three lines, so we get deep … keep … sleep … sleep. Such repetition-as-rhyme (technically known as homorhyme) conveys a sense of stasis, an inability to move on.

At least, there’s an inability to move on psychologically. Physically is a different matter: Frost’s speaker knows, on the contrary, that he must keep moving, though we get the impression he would much rather stay and rest here amongst the snow-covered trees.

But no: the peace and beauty and tranquillity of the scene are only a momentary enjoyment, and the world of commitments and promises is calling him back to it.

Terrifying Repetition

The critic Lionel Trilling called Frost’s poetry ‘terrifying’, which is perhaps overstating this poem’s unsettling qualities, but does direct us to muse: why does Frost repeat that penultimate line as the final line?

There are two explanations. One is that he is merely reinforcing how far the speaker must travel before he can rest on his journey. The second, and perhaps more persuasive explanation for some, is that through repeating the line ‘And miles to go before I sleep’, Frost imbues both the journey and the sleep with deeper metaphorical (and even metaphysical) meaning.

The rider’s journey, then, becomes life itself as a journey towards our destination, which is death: that final ‘sleep’.

And the fact that the woods are described as dark and deep and lovely despite (or perhaps precisely because of) their darkness and depth suggests that the woods possess a strange pull on the speaker: the deeper darkness they suggest to him, that of the oblivion of death, exercises a powerful fascination, luring him towards it.

But he cannot give in to this temptation. He has people relying on him, he has his work to do, and he must continue on his journey across the miles (years?) until it is his time to ‘sleep’.