"The Wood-Pile" is like a sequel to "Home Burial," with the man in this instance wandering from a "home" that seems little more than an abstraction to him and to us. More a meditation than a dramatic narrative, it offers the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. It is a desolate scene possessed of the loneliness of "Desert Places." Attention is focused on the activity of consciousness in this isolated wanderer, and nothing characterizes him as a social being or as having any relationships to another person. While the poem has resemblances, again, to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," or Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," it is more random in its structuring and has none of the demarcations of the descriptive-reflective mode. A better way to describe the poem is suggested in a talk by A. R. Ammons, "A Poem as a Walk." "A walk involves the whole person; it is not reproducible; its shape occurs, unfolds; it has a motion characteristic of the walker" (Epoch, Fall, 1968, p. 118).
The man in the poem is not, like Stevens' Crispin, "a man come out of luminous traversing," but more like the "listener" in Stevens' "The Snow Man." In each poem is a recognition of a wintry barrenness made more so in Frost by a reductive process by which possibilities of metaphor - of finding some reassuring resemblances - are gradually disposed of. At the end, the speaker in Frost's poem is as "cool" as is the listener in Stevens, and also as peculiarly unanguished by the situation in which he finds himself. It is as if the wintry prospect, the arrival at something like Stevens' First Idea, a cold clarity without redeeming deceptions, has in itself been an achievement of the imagination. It is something won against all such conventional bla...
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...onsciousness; it is wholly self-consuming. As in "Desert Places," another poem about a lonely man walking in a landscape of snow, the man in "The Wood-Pile" could say that "The loneliness includes me unawares." This line is a little poem in itself. It has a syntactical ambiguity more common in Stevens than in Frost. It can mean both that the loneliness includes him but is unaware of doing so, and that the loneliness includes him and he is not aware of its doing so by virtue of his near obliteration. In either case he is not so much included as wiped out; he is included as if he were inseparable from, indistinguishable from, the thing that includes him. He is on the point of being obliterated by the landscape, rather than allowed to exist even as an observer of it, much less a mediating or transcending presence.
Works Cited
Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing.
Across the poems, Come In, In Winter In, Dust of Snow, Stopping by a Wood on a Snowy Evening, and Beech by Robert Frost all share a common theme: Man’s Isolation. While every poem is unique to their text, Frost implies that he would rather be alone, than with the crowd. Some poems portray isolation in a different way, but when you look carefully, they are saying the same thing across all works. The definition of isolation is the state of being in a place or situation that is separate than others.In general, isolation can mean plenty of things, regardless of it’s definition. The poems that all carry this theme all interpret different meanings of isolation, while still being one theme. When looking at Dust of Snow, for example, the speaker shows some sort of sadness or depression, there’s not a soul in sight.
Robert Frost’s dramatic poem Home Burial depicts two tragedies: the loss of an infant and the deterioration of a marriage that follows. The emotional dialogue characterizes husband and wife with their habits of speech, illustrating the ways that they deal with grief. Instead of comforting her in her distress, the husband attempts at every turn to force his wife to cease grieving. The unnamed farmer’s inability to console his wife, who seems to feel so much more deeply the loss of her child, combined with her inability to see any feeling at all in her husband’s actions, contribute to a conflict that seems unresolvable by the end of the poem. But Frost’s diction suggests that it is the husband’s style of communication, not his method of grieving, that is the true cause of the vast distance between the two.
Robert Frost is considered by many to be one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Frost’s work has been regarded by many as unique. Frost’s poems mainly take place in nature, and it is through nature that he uses sense appealing-vocabulary to immerse the reader into the poem. In the poem, “Hardwood Groves”, Frost uses a Hardwood Tree that is losing its leaves as a symbol of life’s vicissitudes. “Frost recognizes that before things in life are raised up, they must fall down” (Bloom 22).
After America was recognized as an independent country from England, the new republic went through almost twenty years worth of trial and error to find a government that would satisfy the needs of the citizens, the states, and the central national government. The most memorable, and influential, action of this time would have to be the Connecticut Compromise, proposed Roger Sherman, following the proposal of the Large and Small State plans at the Constitutional Convention of 1787. This Compromise directly affected the amount of representation from each state, and created the government system we are familiar with today.
Carl von Clausewitz, “What is War?” On War. Edited and translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, 89-112. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976.
As children grow and develop, their actions become more self-directed and less subject to outside regulation by others (Poulsen, et al., 2006, p....
The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative. "What Is a Child Soldier?" Childsoldiers.org. The Roméo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative, 2013. Web. 29 Dec. 2013.
Examine the ways in which Frost explores ideas about loneliness and isolation in three poems you have studied.
...ed by many scholars as his best work. It is through his awareness of the merit, the definitive disconnectedness, of nature and man that is most viewable in this poem. Throughout this essay, Frosts messages of innocence, evil, and design by deific intrusion reverberate true to his own personal standpoint of man and nature. It is in this, that Frost expresses the ideology of a benign deity.
There is a current belief within the government that the focus on income over the last decades has ignored the root causes of poverty and this has resulted in a multitude of social problems which have now become deep rooted. In 1941 the government commissioned a report to establish how society could be rebuilt after the war. The Beveridge report (1942) aimed to eradicate the ‘five evils’ to be: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. The work of Beveridge is still evident today as it led to many things which other countries are not fortunate to have such as a National Health Service which was introduced in 1948 along with our welfare state which was designed to protect us from ‘the cradle to the grave’ (bbc) The main driving force behind The Beveridge Report (1942) was to ...
Loneliness Robert Frost is one of the most famous and influential poets in our nation's history. His simple style of writing and constant attention to nature make his poems unique. His poems have captivated thousands and have been analyzed time and time again. Many feel that his poems often times represent emptiness, loneliness, and despair. The poem "Desert Places" certainly falls into these categories.
Stevens’ message reveals itself as the poem unravels: there is never one true understanding of a reality outside of one’s interpretation. The author suggests that one can’t help but transfer their own beliefs and ideas onto what they see; in this case, the “listener” is projecting an impression of misery onto the scenery that lies before him. For example, the first two stanzas are filled with decorative language that serves to describe the visual image of a winter landscape. Using phrases such as “crusted with snow” (3) instead of “covered” with snow provides an evocative illustration of the snow’s roughness. Other phrases such as “shagged with ice” (5) and “rough in the distant glitter/Of the January sun” (6-7) force the reader to experience the miserable portrayal of winter. These are not the descriptions of an observer who “beholds nothing that is not there” (14-15), but rather the objective, poetic appreciation for the snowy
Desetta.A, Wolin.A. (2000). The Struggle to Be Strong: True Stories by Teens About Overcoming Tough Times, Free Sprit Publishing.
The poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the poet’s mental journey in nature where he remembers the daffodils that give him joy when he is lonely and bored. The poet is overwhelmed by nature’s beauty where he thought of it while lying alone on his couch. The poem shows the relationship between nature and the poet, and how nature’s motion and beauty influences the poet’s feelings and behaviors for the good. Moreover, the process that the speaker goes through is recollected that shows that he isolated from society, and is mentally in nature while he is physically lying on his couch. Therefore, William Wordsworth uses figurative language and syntax and form throughout the poem to express to the readers the peace and beauty of nature, and to symbolize the adventures that occurred in his mental journey.
First, in the poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” there is a lot of nature expressed. Frost’s very first sentence already talks about the woods. Whose woods these are we don’t know. Also, in the poem he states that the narrator likes to sit and watch the snow. He is also a nature lover. In the second stanza Frost refers back to the woods. He must also like ice, because he brings ice and cold up a lot in his poems. Once again Frost brings ice up when he mentions flake and cold wind.