The Solitary Waggoner:

An Etonymic Analysis of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”

The narrator in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is out on a nocturnal

mission: he has “promises to keep”, and “miles to go” before he can keep them. Why,
then, does he pause? He is evidently engaged in something covert, something done in the
“dark”, indeed in the shadows of the year’s “darkest evening”. It is something slightly
shameful, something the narrator would not want the woods’ owner to see him doing.
Whatever it is embarrasses his “little horse”, who believes a “mistake” is being made,
that something “queer” (a word suggestive of sexual deviancy) is going on. What could
that be? A close reading of the poem suggests that the narrator has stopped to
masturbate1.

The poet is alone. All other human beings are far away, in the “village” or the
distant “farmhouse”. Tellingly, the description of a landscape made white--“snowy”,
“frozen”, covered with “downy flake”—omits only one obvious correlative word:
“frost”. The poem’s diction, with this coy hint at the poet’s own name2, suggests that the
poem is about something pertaining deeply but embarrassingly to the poet himself,
something so embarrassing that he demurs to give his name. This is reinforced by the use
of the word “bell” and the ringing (that is, the tolling) of the bell by the poet’s horse (“He
gives his harness bells a shake”). For John Donne, “No man is an island, entire of itself”;
one should “not ask for whom the bell tolls” because “it tolls for thee.” Here, conversely,
the poet is entire of himself, completely alone, distant from “house”, “village” and
“farmhouse”, as if on an island, and is indeed tolling a bell: his own (see the discussion
of the figure of the ringing bell as orgasm infra.) For Donne, society is of a piece and
comprises all men; for the poet on this evening, there is no intercourse with others, social
or sexual--there is only the self and its solitary pleasures.

Throughout the poem, Frost deftly employs the technique of using one word to
suggest two things, or many. The poem’s title, which describes a man “stopping by
woods”, is the first use of this device. The word “by” carries two meanings: position (a
cat sat “by” a window); and agency (a running back was headed for the end zone until
stopped “by” a bruising tackle). Frost’s reader at first understands that the poet has
stopped near the “woods”; then the reader also realizes that the poet has decided to stop
because of the “woods”. Since “wood” is a slang term for an erection (a “woody”)3, the
poem’s title signals that the poet, finding himself alone at night near a forest in a state of
unexpected sexual arousal, has stopped to attend to it. The pluralization of “wood”

1
“Little” (“little horse”) is a word often coupled with “child” (e.g., “and a little child shall lead them”,
Isaiah 11:6). This suggests the horse’s sexual innocence. Thus it is sexual activity is the source of the
horse’s discomfort. This is reinforced when the horse “gives his harness bells a shake” thereby making
himself into a shaker--that is, one who shuns sexual activity.
2
For a discussion of a similar example of reference by omission, see Paul Muldoon’s discussion of W. B.
Yeats’ “All Hallows Eve” in The End of the Poem, wherein Muldoon argues that by filling the first stanza
with images of wine while omitting the obvious correlative, “lees”, Yeats refers to his wife, Georgie Hyde-
Lees.
3
Note, too, the implied compounding word, “pecker”, slang for penis.
emphasizes this: he has stopped by one wood, a forest, because of his other wood, his
aroused sex organ. The poet drives the point home by using the word “wood” again in
lines 4, 7 and 13. This pattern of rhythmic repetition is mirrors the repetitive motion of
copulation. The repetition also emphasizes the poet’s obsession with his “wood”: as the
most often repeated word in the poem, “wood” rules the poem’s diction and also the
poet’s consciousness by its constant reappearance, its urgent insistence that it be attended
to, that it be relieved of the stress4 of arousal not acted upon.

The figure of the horse is similarly multilayered. Riding a horse was a common
metaphor for sexual intercourse in the ancient world. Thus a Roman fresco at Pompeii
depicts a man penetrating a woman from the rear, pretending to ride her with one hand in
the air as if holding her reins.5 Thus, to like effect, Lear: “Let copulation thrive. . .The
fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t/With a more riotous appetite” (King Lear, V:4). A
male horse hired out to breed mares is a “stud”, which is also slang for a sexually active
man. “Stud” also refers to a kind of board (wood) used in building, and in that sense is
etymologically related to “stick” and “staff”, both words with phallic overtones. A “frost
stud” is a large-headed horseshoe nail (a phallic symbol) that protrudes below the
horseshoe6, an implicit reference to Frost’s own sexuality.

The horse is specifically the poet’s “little horse”, an endearment that is likely the
poet’s affectionate diminutive for his sex organ; Elvis Presley, for example, called his
penis “Little Elvis”7. Consider, then, how the phrase “He gives his harness bells a
shake” is layered with implicit meanings. By adding but a letter to one word and
changing a letter in another, the line is rendered bluntly phallic: “He gives his har[d]ness
b[a]lls a shake”; that is, he (nominally the horse, but implicitly the poet via the
identification of the “little horse” with Frost’s penis) manipulates his erect sex organ and
his scrotum. Continuing this linguistic doubleness, the poet chooses “shake”, a word that
rhymes with and is but a single letter distant from “snake”, which is both slang for the
penis and which summons up the serpent of Eden. And, indeed, just as the serpent
spoiled Eden through the transmission of sexual knowledge (“and the eyes of them both
were opened, and they knew that they were naked”8), the poet, through the Onanistic
spilling of his seed (“downy flake”) on the ground, soils the garden-like setting in which
he pauses. Of course, “shake” also half-rhymes with “stroke”, and is further associated
with “stroke” because it is a “bell” that is shaken, “bell” and “stroke” being words that
are frequently paired (e.g., “Every stroke that the death-bell tolled/Cried woe to Barbara
Allen,”9; cf. “The stroke of midnight” with its implicit reference to a clock-tower bell.)

“The woods”—that is, the object the insistent thought of which has seized the
poet’s mind and stopped him on his journey—are also “dark and deep”. “Deep” is often

4
“Wood” is the stressed syllable of each foot in which it appears.
5
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pompeii_brothel_2.jpg
6
Blood, D. C., V. P. Studdert and C. C. Gay, Saunders Comprehensive Veterinary Dictionary 3rd Edition
(Elsevier).
7
Albert Goldman, quoted in Images of Elvis Presley in American Culture: 1977-1997, George Plasketes.
Haworth Press: 1997. p. 202.
8
Genesis 3:7, King James Version
9
Var. of Child, The English Ballades, 84.

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conjoined to “hole” (vagina10), and, as Lear vividly reminds us, darkness is profoundly
associated with the female genitalia (King Lear, V:4):
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above.
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend's.
There's hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit;
burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
And in the proliferation of plant life that makes up the “woods”, one expects to find a
“bush”, vulgar slang for the female pudendum11 (note the juxtaposition of “wood/bush”
with “dark and deep” and see the discussion infra). The poet is distracted, then, by a
fantasy involving a woman’s sex organs. He notes that there is no “farmhouse near.” The
farmhouse is the archetypal locus of illicit sex between men and eager young women in
innumerable “farmer’s daughter” jokes that were undoubtedly known to Frost, and the
use of the term suggests his longing for an absent female sexual partner.

“Wind”, too, functions on several levels to summon up thoughts of male

masturbation. It evokes its companion-word, “horn” (e.g., Spenser, “to wind his horn
under the castle wall”), a word which in turn evokes a phallus-like object (e.g., “saddle
horn”—which itself connects back to “horse”). “Horn” refers doubly to sexual desire
(“horny”) and illicit sexual activity (a cuckolded husband was said to wear horns). As a
transitive verb, “wind” means to twist or coil, especially a cylindrical object like a rope,
hinting at what the poet’s hands are about around his sex organ.12 And “sweep” in the
preceding line both implies a repetitive back-and-forth manual motion like that of male
masturbation and, again, is an action connected with a hard, cylindrical, quasi-phallic
object, a broomstick (which is, of course, made of wood).

The horse in the poem shakes his bell. The Sexual slang holds that a man who
has brought a woman to orgasm has “rung her bell”13; thus in the poem the poet (the
horse) has brought himself to climax (has rung his own bell).

At last, then, despite his guilt and the noisy distraction created by his horse, the
poet is able to achieve sexual as well as narrative climax: “The only other sound’s the
sweep/Of easy wind and downy flake.”14 “Easy wind” is fraught with sexual
implications. It evokes the exhalation of breath upon reaching orgasm. Its implied half
10
“Vagina”. Collins Cobuild English Dictionary for Advanced Learners: 4thEd. HarperCollins Publishers:
London. 1983. http://dictionary.reverso.net/english-synonyms/vagina.
11
“Bush”. Partridge, Eric, Tom Dalzell, Terry Victor. The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and
Unconventional English. Routledge. 2007.
12
Note, too, that by shaking his bell the horse necessarily “rings” it. To “make a ring” is to form a circle,
which is the posture of a man’s hand and fingers around the shaft of his penis during masturbation.
Similarly, “wring”, a homonym of “ring”, implies a masturbatory twisting motion. One who winds a rope
into a coil is said to “snake” the rope (see discussion supra); thus “wind”, too, carries phallic and
masturbatory echoes. And, interestingly, “queer” derives from the Indo-European “twerk”, a transitive verb
meaning to wind or twist.
13
Sex-lexis.com: the language of love.
14
“Flake” is etymologically related to an Old Norse verb meaning “to skin” or “to flay”, suggesting a
peeling back of the (fore)skin.

3
rhyme with “oozy” suggests the expelling of a viscous liquid, a suggestion that is
amplified by the reference to “downy flake”, for a snowfall is nothing more than a cloudy
whiteness made up of innumerable microscopic, separate and individually unique
particles, just as semen is composed of sperm cells. Since “frost” is the whiteness that
covers the ground and “lake” is an anagram for “leak”, “frozen lake” implies “frost[‘s]
leak”, or the poet’s ejaculation. The repetition of “wood” here reaches its own climax:
“wood” is a half rhyme for “weed”, which both rhymes with “seed” (sperm) and also
denotes a plant that grows in abundance when seed is scattered on the ground15. The
horse is hitched to a wagon. In the poem’s rural setting (far from “the village. . .without a
farmhouse near”), a man would use a wagon to haul a burden, that is, a load
(“wagonload”). This burden is finally eased (“easy”) by the “wind”, i.e., by that which
blows; the poet, then, has finally blown his load. Thus relieved, he may at last attend to
the “promises” which he must “keep”. True, there are still “miles to go”; but at last he
can “go”--because he has first “come”.

The conventional exegesis of the poem holds that it depicts a man “half in love
with easeful death”. Even that reading, however, supports an alternative, masturbatory
interpretation. In Elizabethan literature, “to die” was to have an orgasm. Thus
Shakespeare writes in Much Ado About Nothing, “I will live in thy heart and die in thy
lap”; and, again, in King Lear, “I will die bravely, like a smug bridegroom.” The modern
French euphemism for orgasm is “la petite mort”. Yes, the poet does wish to “die”, but in
the Elizabethan sense as well as the literal sense. Hamlet, too, longs “to die, to sleep,
perchance to dream/’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Frost’s poem echoes
Hamlet not only through the poet’s implicit longing to “die” but also in his explicit
longing to “sleep” (“miles to go before I sleep”). Orgasm is, of course, often followed by
sleep.16 The use of “lovely” also calls up the act of love, or, in this instance, self-love.

Once the layers of the poem are peeled back through the process of what Harold
Bloom calls “romanc[ing] the etonym”17, it is apparent that, at a deep level, the poem is
about a man who, alone and experiencing sudden sexual arousal in an unpopulated
setting, pauses to satisfy himself. The night is dark, but the landscape now glistens in the
self-generated whiteness—the “frost”--with which the Onanistic poet, Frost, has
figuratively covered it. His nocturnal mission has turned into a nocturnal emission. He is
the very exemplar of what in law is called a servant out on a frolic of his own. Given the
poet’s inclination to hint at meanings by use of half rhymes and etymological layering,
Frost’s private title for the poem could well have been “Stroking My Wood on a Snowy
Evening”.

--Alfred Reddix Holston

15
“And Onan knew that the seed should not be his; and it came to pass, when he went in unto his brother's
wife, that he spilled it on the ground, lest that he should give seed to his brother” Genesis 38:9, King James
Version; cf. “wind” in the sense of “windfall” or a scattering of (seed-bearing) fruit on the ground.
16
“Consummation” is itself a word that is used to denote sexual intercourse between a newlywed man and
wife.
17
Bloom, Harold. The Best Poems of the English Language. New York: HarperCollins Publishers 2004, p.
3.