In “Home Burial” by Robert Frost, Frost portrays an argument between a couple and examines the grief two individual’s go through along with their response to each other’s grief. The poem follows a married couple and illustrates a confrontation between the two concerning their feelings towards the loss of their son, but the confrontation later reveals a deeper problem in their relationship. Frost, drawing inspiration from his own life experiences, utilizes these characters to portray that individuals have differences that cause them to respond differently to grief and how having to alter such things to please another can cause a rift in any relationship. Specifically, Frost portrays the unraveling of a relationship. The two characters …show more content…
These factors lead to the unraveling of the relationship as the conflict precedes and is described through both of their views on the issue. As the topic of their son was brought up, which is the cause of the confrontation, the woman immediately “withdrew shrinking from beneath his arm”, illustrating how she feels as she faces him in such a situation (33). The woman feels she must make herself and her emotions smaller, ultimately concealing them completely from him, as she faces him due to his inability to understand her, avoiding his questions and comments. Throughout the poem she seems insistent in leaving their home saying “[She] must get out of [there]. [She] must get air” because she feels suffocated both by his way of responding to situations which have taken an emotional toll on her and her incapability of being able to have closure on the situation while living in conditions that are not being of assistance to her (39). These actions show how she has to alter some aspects of her personality when speaking to him to please him, and he feels like he has to do the same. As he says “A man must partly give up being a man / With women-folk”, he is describing how he feels he must give up his opinion or view on certain topics and even says “[they] could have some arrangement by which [he’d] bind [himself] to keep hands off / Anything special [she’s] a-mind to name” (52-55). He continues by describing how having such disagreements and having to make compromises with each other are part of being in a relationship “Though [he doesn’t] like such things ‘twix those that love”, but now that he sees how serious she is about
My initial response to the poem was a deep sense of empathy. This indicated to me the way the man’s body was treated after he had passed. I felt sorry for him as the poet created the strong feeling that he had a lonely life. It told us how his body became a part of the land and how he added something to the land around him after he died.
The funeral was supposed to be a family affair. She had not wanted to invite so many people, most of them strangers to her, to be there at the moment she said goodbye. Yet, she was not the only person who had a right to his last moments above the earth, it seemed. Everyone, from the family who knew nothing of the anguish he had suffered in his last years, to the colleagues who saw him every day but hadn’t actually seen him, to the long-lost friends and passing acquaintances who were surprised to find that he was married, let alone dead, wanted to have a last chance to gaze upon him in his open coffin and say goodbye.
The Romantic Era was a time when writers wrote with passion in relation to elements of writing such as the fantastic or supernatural, the improbable, the sentimental, and the horrifying. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the many writers who used elements such as these in his writings. Poe was famous for reflecting the dark aspects of his mind in a story, creating detailed imagery intriguing the reader. The fantastic and supernatural elements are expressed in The Premature Burial as impossible and in a sense, horrifying. The idea of people walking after their believed death is very extreme thinking in a world that seems normal.
Imagine that the person you love most in the world dies. How would you cope with the loss? Death and grieving is an agonizing and inevitable part of life. No one is immune from death’s insidious and frigid grip. Individuals vary in their emotional reactions to loss. There is no right or wrong way to grieve (Huffman, 2012, p.183), it is a melancholy ordeal, but a necessary one (Johnson, 2007). In the following: the five stages of grief, the symptoms of grief, coping with grief, and unusual customs of mourning with particular emphasis on mourning at its most extravagant, during the Victorian era, will all be discussed in this essay (Smith, 2014).
Robert Frost is undoubtedly gifted when it comes to his poetry, but not all aspects of his life were so easy. One of the most troubling areas in Frost’s life was his family. He held a long term engagement to his wife Elinor, whom he pleaded to marry. Also, his children were plagued with birth defects, terminal illness, and emotional instability. The Frosts lost four of their children at an early age, including daughter Elinor Bettina who died three days after birth. In 1938, after months of deteriorating health, Frost’s wife Elinor died of heart failure. Frost was so shaken that he collapsed and could not attend the memorial services. Later, in 1940, Frost was utterly disturbed by his son Carol’s suicide.
Fulfilling the roles of both mother and breadwinner creates an assortment of reactions for the narrator. In the poem’s opening lines, she commences her day in the harried role as a mother, and with “too much to do,” (2) expresses her struggle with balancing priorities. After saying goodbye to her children she rushes out the door, transitioning from both, one role to the next, as well as, one emotion to another. As the day continues, when reflecting on
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
For many people, death can be a disheartening topic or event. It is a loss of someone that most times is deeply cared for and loved. “Little Talks” by Of Monsters and Men describes the aftermath of a man’s death from the perspective of both the man and his widow. According to Nanna, one of the lead singers of the group, "It’s about a couple and the husband passed away and it’s from the conversation between the two of them” (CITE). At first read, the poem seems to be depressing and alludes to the idea of a breaking relationship. The relationship appears to have been long term because the poem speaks of days when they were young and “…an old voice in my head” (11). The woman is walking through an “…old and
...ple. The way that Frost uses body language, shows how distant that the couple is becoming. There are many ways that people can handle grief, this poem is just one way that two people handle their lost. “Home Burial” also gives the “morbidness of death in these remote place; a women unable to take up her life again when her only child has died. The charming idyll” (Robyn V. Young, Editor, 195).
This, in fact, is an example of “dynamic decomposition” of which the speaker claims she understands nothing. The ironic contradiction of form and content underlines the contradiction between the women’s presentation of her outer self and that of her inner self. The poem concludes with the line “’Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.’” which is a statement made by the man. Hence, it “appears to give the last word to the men” but, in reality, it mirrors the poem’s opening lines and emphasises the role the woman assumes on the outside as well as her inner awareness and criticism. This echoes Loy’s proclamation in her “Feminist Manifesto” in which she states that women should “[l]eave off looking to men to find out what [they] are not [but] seek within [themselves] to find out what [they] are”. Therefore, the poem presents a “new woman” confined in the traditional social order but resisting it as she is aware and critical of
In the poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, by Emily Dickinson and “Home Burial”, by Robert Frost, literary elements are used throughout both poems to get the message the authors are trying to portray. One main important literary element that is used to entice the reader, is symbolism, because it helps the authors describe something without actual describing it. Symbolism is also used because it shows how significant an object is. Characterization is also an important literary technique because it, gives the reader an idea on how the character would act, work, and their values in life. Death is a topic that is used in both poems. Also, every character express their opinion about death differently.
Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden is a short poem that illustrates the emotions that he is dealing with after the love of his life passes away. The tone of this piece evokes feelings that will differ depending on the reader; therefore, the meaning of this poem is not in any way one-dimensional, resulting in inevitable ambiguity . In order to evoke emotion from his audience, Auden uses a series of different poetic devices to express the sadness and despair of losing a loved one. This poem isn’t necessarily about finding meaning or coming to some overwhelming realization, but rather about feeling emotions and understanding the pain that the speaker is experiencing. Through the use of poetic devices such as an elegy, hyperboles, imagery, metaphors, and alliterations as well as end-rhyme, Auden has created a powerful poem that accurately depicts the emotions a person will often feel when the love of their live has passed away.
She defines her idea of what is right in a relationship by describing how hard and painful it is for her to stray from that ideal in this instance. As the poem evolves, one can begin to see the author having a conflict with values, while simultaneously expressing which values are hers and which are unnatural to her. She accomplishes this accounting of values by personalizing her position in a somewhat unsettling way throughout the poem.
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a poem composed by Thomas Gray over a period of ten years. Beginning shortly after the death of his close friend Richard West in 1742, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was first published in 1751. This poem’s use of dubbal entendre may lead the intended audience away from the overall theme of death, mourning, loss, despair and sadness; however, this poem clearly uses several literary devices to convey the author’s feelings toward the death of his friend Richard West, his beloved mother, aunt and those fallen soldiers of the Civil War. This essay will discuss how Gray uses that symbolism and dubbal entendre throughout the poem to convey the inevitability of death, mourning, conflict within self, finding virtue in one’s life, dealing with one’s misfortunes and giving recognition to those who would otherwise seem insignificant.
Although written in the twentieth century, much of Robert Frost’s poetry is still relevant today. Frost is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. His poetry was largely based on, although not limited to, man’s ever present battle with understanding his relationship with nature. Frost constantly illustrates the difficulties man face, and how they struggle to develop individual identities in the world that they live in. Frosts style and structure are said to take a more 19th century traditional stance however similarities are prominent with his work and the works of his twentieth century contemporaries. “A brook in the city” is a poem that demonstrates Frosts concerns of ever changing human life and man’s attitude towards nature and preservation, this essay will discuss if this poem, in connection with many others, exemplifies Frosts poetic style and views on poetry as a whole.