IRL, Frost wrote this immediately after spending an all-nighter writing a much longer poem. As such, I’m standing by my “study break” hypothesis.
You gotta figure that extra syllable is him shaking off the last drop.
Here in Frost’s home state, most people I know around my age, and I as well, were taught that it’s about deciding against suicide because of duties the tired narrator feels he must deal with instead of taking the easy way out.
A friend from out west said her professor insisted it’s a sex poem, though.
In school I was also “taught” that it was about facing off against suicidal thoughts.
At the time I believed the poem was about the struggle between man made rules (who owns the land) and the benefits of sharing (the narrator enjoying the woods that did not belong to him, illicitly).
My interpretation now, as I recall the whole thing to myself and read this thread, is that it’s about how activities that normally would be boring or even unpleasant (standing around in freezing cold, in a snowy nowhere-in-particular, in the dark of midwinter night, by yourself, while your horse acts impatient) is irresistibly enticing when you have a lot of work you’re supposed to be doing but don’t particularly want to jump up and do. In other words, it’s about the joys of procrastination.
A lot of it has to do with the mindset the reader brings to it, I expect 
my favorite poem since reading it in third grade. Always thought it was about growing old and accepting upcoming death but not giving up as you still have life to live until death.
I’m not too familiar with this poem and the last line of the first verse reminds me of Housman (“About the woodlands I will go, To see the cherry hung with snow”) which is a completely different poem.
I can see the suicide angle. It’s cold, it’s isolated, it’s the “darkest evening”, the dark depths of the woods are “lovely” (enticing) and he is watching them fill up with snow, at which point, he will freeze to death. He’s worried what the neighbours will think, and his horse thinks he is crazy but all he really wants to do is sit. The repetition of that last line reads like he is trying to remind himself, urge himself onwards, because he doesn’t really want to move.
The other way to read it, which maybe comes more easily to me, is that he is aware of the allure of the woods, but he is too worried about ll these obligations to everyone else to really embrace it. There is only that one line about “watching the woods fill with snow” that makes me think he stops for more than a minute.
Again, there is no right or wrong interpretation, but to me it just says:
A New Englander in that time would be thinking: It’s fucking cold… It’s fucking dark… I got shit to do… but you know, once in awhile if you just stop and look, even the snow in a leafless forest is beautiful. OK. let’s get back to fighting against this winter hell and get some shit done.
I remember being taught it was about suicide, but I read it just now and didn’t see it. I’m not saying it can’t be, as Weedy illustrates, but I think such a reading is overcomplicating it.
It really does just feel like he is enjoying a scene and then begrudging having to go back to work.
Whose woods these are? God’s. His house, the church, is in the village. Frost is thinking about going into God’s woods.
Before I sleep? The Big Sleep. Too many obligations before starting it, though. That’s Frost’s excuse for not having the guts to do it.
It’s about suicide, people! Come on already.
Obviously not, as shown by the next line.
This is pretty much how I read it. One of my favorite Frost poems, and I have a particularly soft spot for Frost as he’s where my interest in poetry started.
The poem itself just paints a wintry scene with its rhythm, sounds, and imagery. It’s very simple. It’s quiet. It’s isolating. It’s meditative. When I read it, I think Frost is just trying to set this scene of reflection and admiration/appreciation, of a pause in our busy worlds, before ending with the repeating couplet that, to me, conveys a sense of much work still left undone. Seemingly unending work, in fact, is what the repetition suggests to me.
Now, the poem is sufficiently vague that one can imbue whatever metaphorical content one wishes upon it. It’s almost like a Zen koan in a way. But poems usually aren’t written to be solved like puzzles. I don’t understand why so many readers want to treat poems in this way, like they’re about exactly one thing. Some may be, but I think most of the great poems capture a feeling that can be generalized to many different situations and interpretations. I feel the same way about visual art. I don’t think “what does this mean?” I think “how does it make me feel?” or simply “what do I see in this?”
“A poem should not mean, but be.” - Archibald MacLeish, Ars Poetica
Perfectly said.
It’s the tug of ambiguity that makes this poem attractive to me. At the end we still don’t know what decision he makes. And the weight of his obligations is emphasized by the repetition of the last line.
It’s Everyman’s struggle - the burden of daily life versus either the option of finding solace in nature, or the more gloomy reading, the mystery of what happens when you succumb to the temptation of “the woods.”
The woods are lovely. But they are also dark and deep. An attractive, but also potentially dangerous, place where the unknown exists.
How many of us, in our more contemplative moments alone and in the cold and dark, haven’t questioned whether it wouldn’t be easier to make the unknown choice? It doesn’t make us suicidal, necessarily.
I forgot the horse! Why is the line about the impatient and quizical horse worth examining?
Maybe it is the contrast between the animal world and the human world. Animals accept their role in life seemingly without questioning it. They do their duty and then they die, unlike man, who is prone to “what ifs.”
I can’t tell. Are you serious?
It’s worse than that, even. If you’re going to insist that a poem is about exactly one thing, then the exactly one thing that this one is about is a guy pausing on a journey to admire the scenery. To even get to the esoteric interpretations at all, you have to start by assuming that it is about more than one thing, namely, the surface meaning and the deeper one.
Makes sense in my reading.
I’d call it “civilization.” The civilized people are remote from the woods. They do their duty and don’t question. (Some might call that “God.”)
They are not the ones out there in the cold and dark giving thought to other choices.
Another contrast.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Emily Dickinson.
“A poem need not bean but me.” Me
The tone I read in that post is not-quite-serious. ETA: But I admit, there is some ambiguity there, upon re-read. Maybe I’m forcing my own interpretation and mindset up on it. 