What is the tone of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"? Explain.

I think that this question has a few answers (it's subjective, so what you think can probably be proven correct through analyzing the text!).

One way to look at this poem is to say that it has a dark and dreary tone. The poem uses dark imagery coupled with a rhyming meter to create an eerie tone. First we will discuss the imagery. Frost makes a point to state that he is on his horse in the woods, while it's snowing (!!!), on the darkest night of the year (eek!). Sounds dangerous and kind of scary! To take it further, Frost states that the woods are "lovely, dark and deep." To state that being in the woods while it's snowing in the dark is lovely is kind of crazy. A normal response would be to say that it is scary or bleak.

The poem's rhyming meter is Shakespeare'e favorite: iambic pentameter. As iambic pentameter is considered regular meter of stressed and unstressed syllables, it allows the poem to be read quickly and almost like a song. Let's take a step back for a second: Frost wrote a dark, dreary poem where he calls a dangerous situation in the woods "lovely" and it is written in a sing-song tone. If we take these clues, we could postulate that this poem is about suicide or, more generally, just about death.

Again, this is just one way to analyze this poem. The tone could also be perceived as bucolic (celebrating the countryside), solitary (just a dude and his horse!), or any other word that you can think of to describe how the images presented in this poem help get the message of the poem across.