Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

*****

In June 2023 Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the United States, and President Joe Biden gave him an autographed first edition copy of the ‘Collected Poems of Robert Frost’. (Modi gave Biden a copy of the ‘Ten Principal Upanishads’ by Purohit Swami and William Butler Yeats – the latter being a poet that Biden frequently quotes.)

In India the gift of Frost’s work was recognised as a tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. Nehru, apart from being a founding father of Indian democracy, was a prodigious writer with a love of history, poetry and nature; in Himalayan vacations he went horseback riding and exploring woods. Frost’s poetry was a natural for him. Nehru had a particular fondness for ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Towards the end of his life he kept a copy of Frost’s poems by his bedside, with the last stanza of “Stopping by Woods” underlined:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Photos: Jawaharlal Nehru’s study and bedroom, preserved as they were at the time of his death.