The Natural World

Our speaker is digging the natural world. Picture him hanging out with his horse, between a frozen lake and the edge of the woods, while the snows falls gently all around him. The ideas of the village, of a farmhouse, or of the promises he must keep are not nearly as appetizing to our speaker as the cold beauty of the world around him. There's something very lulling about the "easy wind and downy flake" (12), and we get the sense that the natural world is pretty compelling and pretty good at convincing our speaker to forget about civilization. Nature is powerful in this poem.

• Lines 6-8: With these lines, we get a crystal clear image of the snowy woods and frozen lake at night.
• Line 11: We can almost hear the sound of the wind in the alliteration of "sound's the sweep."
• Line 13: While the fact that the woods are "lovely, dark and deep" might not seem visually helpful, this description actually helps us visualize the image of the woods even more clearly.