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Robert frost Poetic Contributions
Critical analysis of the poem home burial by robert frost
Robert frost Poetic Contributions
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In “Home Burial,” Robert Frost uses language and imagery to show how differently a man and a women deal with grief. The poem not only describes the grief the two feel for the loss of their child but also the impending death of a marriage. Frost shows this by using a dramatic style set in New England.
In his narrative poem, Frost starts a tense conversation between the man and the wife whose first child had died recently. Not only is there dissonance between the couple,but also a major communication conflict between the husband and the wife. As the poem opens, the wife is standing at the top of a staircase looking at her child’s grave through the window. Her husband is at the bottom of the stairs (“He saw her from the bottom of the stairs” l.1), and he does not understand what she is looking at or why she has suddenly become so distressed. The wife resents her husband’s obliviousness and attempts to leave the house. The husband begs her to stay and talk to him about what she feels. Husband does not understand why the wife is angry with him for manifesting his grief in a different way. Inconsolable, the wife lashes out at him, convinced of his indifference toward their dead child. The husband accepts her anger, but the separation between them remains. The wife leaves the house as husband angrily threatens to drag her back by force.
The main event is the death of the child, which has happened previously to the beginning of the poem. This event foreshadows the death of the marriage which will happen after the poem. The husband and wife go through the grief process in many different ways. The wife believes that her husband does not understand her or the grief in which she feels. Online 10, she shouts at him, “You couldn't care!...
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...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).
Works Cited
Ferster, Judith. Arguing through Literature: A Thematic Anthology and Guide. New York: The McGraw-Hill, 2005. 749-751. Print.
Jason, Philip K. Masterplots II. 4th . Pasadena: Salem Press, Inc., 2002. 1741. Print.
Young, Robyn V. Poetry Criticism. 1. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1991. 193. Print.
Home Burial. Frost, Robert. 1915. North of Boston." 6. Home Burial. Frost, Robert. 1915. North of Boston. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Mar. 2014.
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.
At the beginning of the poem, the audience is able to witness an event of a young boy asking his father for story. While the father was deemed a “sad” man, it is later shown that his sadness can be contributed to his fear of his son leaving him. The structure then correlated to the point of going into the future. The future was able to depict what would happen to the loving duo. The father's dreams would become a reality and the son's love and admiration would cease to exist as he is seen screaming at his father. Wanting nothing to do with him. The young, pure child can be seen trying to back lash at his father for acting like a “god” that he can “never disappoint.” The point of this structure was not really a means of clarification from the beginning point of view, but more as an intro to the end. The real relationship can be seen in line 20, where it is mentioned that the relationship between the father and son is “an emotional rather than logical equation.” The love between this father and son, and all its complexity has no real solution. But rather a means of love; the feelings a parent has for wanting to protect their child and the child itself wanting to be set free from their parents grasp. The structure alone is quite complex. Seeing the present time frame of the father and son
...s that have a much defined rhyme scheme. Therefore, the poem becomes a more serious and personal epilogue to seal the past behind him, perhaps, having therapeutic aspects for Frost himself in retelling the grief they (Frost and his wife) went through. The title of the poem ‘Home Burial’ itself could be read as a double-entendre; these being the death and the burial of a child and the symbolic death of a marriage. An alternative narrative line has been concluded by Benjamin West saying ‘The true subject of the poem – from a biographical perspective – is the death of Frost’s nephew, child of his sister-in-law Leona White Harvey, in 1895. It was her relationship with her husband that inspired the poem.’ (West:2011). This alternative opinion conveys that ‘Home Burial’ is not about Frost’s own life although many other critics conceive it is about the death of his son.
The writing style of Edgar Allan Poe shows the writer to be of a dark nature. In this story, he focuses on his fascination of being buried alive. He quotes, “To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these [ghastly] extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” page 58 paragraph 3. The dark nature is reflected in this quote, showing the supernatural side of Poe which is reflected in his writing and is also a characteristic of Romanticism. Poe uses much detail, as shown in this passage, “The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity.” page 59 paragraph 2. The descriptive nature of this writing paints a vivid picture that intrigues the reader to use their imagination and visualize the scene presented in the text. This use of imagery ties with aspects of Romanticism because of the nature of the descriptions Poe uses. Describing the physical features of one who seems dead is a horrifying perspective as not many people thing about the aspects of death.
Robert Lee Frost began life in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. For an unknown reason, Frost believed for years that he was actually born in 1875. When Frost’s father died in 1885 his mother decided to move closer to her wealthy parents in Massachusetts. In California, Frost had dropped out of kindergarten after one day, and upon returning to the first grade, also dropped out. This was no deterrent on Frost to attend college. He was accepted to Harvard but instead attended Dartmouth because of his financial situation. Even though Frost found the school to be anything but challenging, he would not finish his time at Dartmouth, nor earn any formal degree in a school (Bengtsson). He once said of schooling that “Education is hanging around until you’ve caught on.” Interestingly enough, Robert Frost held several postions at credible schools, including Amherst and Harvard. Also, Frost was awarded an incredible amount of honorary degrees from Berkley to Yale (Parini 59). Frosts careers also ranged from editing for Henry Holt to raising poultry on his Derry, New Hampshire farm.
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).
Frost’s application of diction in “Acquainted With the Night” expresses the meaning that hard times provides isolation through key words that provide the audience with proof that the speaker is communicating a detached mood. In line 1, “acquainted,” is a vital use of diction to show the meaning. The word acquainted means to know very well. When the speaker is saying he is “acquainted with the night” in line 1, he is indicating that he is familiar with the lonely night. By being “acquainted” with darkness, or the night, in his life, the speaker is illustrating how being in an isolated state of life is not new to him. The meaning of detached feelings because of hardships is revealed
Frost begins the poem by describing a young boy cutting some wood using a "buzz-saw." The setting is Vermont and the time is late afternoon. The sun is setting and the boy's sister calls he and the other workers to come for "Supper." As the boy hears its dinnertime, he gets excited and cuts his hand on accident. Immediately realizing that the doctor might amputate his hand, he asks his sister to make sure that it does not happen. By the time the doctor arrives, it is too late and the boy's hand is already lost. When the doctor gives him anaesthetic, he falls asleep and never wakes up again. The last sentence of the poem, "since they (the boys family and the doctor) were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" shows how although the boys death is tragic, people move on with their life in a way conveying the idea that people only care for themselves.
This blues poem discusses an incredibly sensitive topic: the death of Trethewey’s mother, who was murdered by her ex-husband when Trethewey was nineteen. Many of her poetry was inspired by the emotions following this event, and recounting memories made thereafter. “Graveyard Blues” details the funeral for Trethewey’s mother, a somber scene. The flowing words and repetition in the poem allow the reader to move quickly, the three-line stanzas grouping together moments. The poem begins with heavy lament, and the immediate movement of the dead away from the living, “Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman [author emphasis]” (Tretheway 8, line 6). Like the epitaph from Wayfaring Stranger, Trethewey indicates that the dead depart the world of the living to some place mysterious, undefined. The living remain, and undertake a different journey, “The road going home was pocked with holes,/ That home-going road’s always full of holes” (Trethewey 8, line 10-11). Trethewey indicates that the mourning is incredibly difficult or “full of holes”, as she leaves the funeral and her mother to return home. ‘Home’ in this poem has become indicative of that which is not Trethewey’s mother, or that which is familiar and comfortable, in vast contrast to the definition of home implied in the
The poem “Ghost House” by Robert Frost is a work that highlights the speaker, and possibly the author’s feelings towards death. This is achieved through the use of an eerie mood via word choice, implications of death, and imagery of a happy, yet ghostly, couple. Thus, the poem progresses in moods from first ominous, then shocking, and finally a slightly perturbing contentedness.
...fall of snow and the unremitting “sweep” of “easy wind” appear tragically indifferent to life, in turn stressing the value of Poirier’s assessment of the poem. Frost uses metaphor in a way that gives meaning to simple actions, perhaps exploring his own insecurities before nature by setting the poem amongst a tempest of “dark” sentiments. Like a metaphor for the workings of the human mind, the pull between the “promises” the traveller should keep and the lure of death remains palpably relevant to modern life. The multitudes of readings opened up through the ambiguity of metaphor allows for a setting of pronounced liminality; between life and death, “night and day, storm and heath, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility,” Frost challenges his readers to delve deep into the subtlety of tone and come to a very personal conclusion.
Home Burial is just one example of Frost’s theme of communication, mainly focusing on the negative aspects. On the opposite hand, though, Frost wrote a poem titled Death of a Hired Man that directly contrasted Frosts other statement about communication. This poem focused on the positive aspects of a successful marriage that benefitted from an open line of communication. In this setting, both the husband and wife are able to discuss their concerns and thought about a previous worker. This worker had broken his contract with them unexpectedly and the husband felt thoroughly wronged by this hired man. Then when his wife mentioned that the hired man appeared again, dying, and wanting to make up for what he had done, the husband quickly turned sour. Their differences in opinion could have ended up disastrous if they had fortified their emotional walls against each other, however, instead they were open and honest about what they thought. Though, the ending of this poem isn’t necessarily a joyous one, the reader can see an example of a successful, communicative marriage, which thrives in the face of problems rather crumbling. In this instance, Frost has given two poems that exemplifies what it means to be communicative with another person. However, he never quite reveals how or why it occurs the way it does. In truth, Frost may be just as lost about its origins and details as the reader is. The first poem in North of Boston, Mending Wall, could be considered a lead in to this unanswered question about communication. Constantly throughout the poem Frost has his characters repeat the phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors” (27). At first glance, this may seem to be a wise phrase about the necessity of boundaries, but to Frost it should most likely have a deeper thought process attached to it. From this phrase and this poem it would seem that Frost is asking, when do
The phrasing of this poem can be analyzed on many levels. Holistically, the poem moves the father through three types of emotions. More specifically, the first lines of the poem depict the father s deep sadness toward the death of his son. The line Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy creates a mental picture in my mind (Line 1). I see the father standing over the coffin in his blackest of outfits with sunglasses shading his eyes from the sun because even the sun is too bright for his day of mourning. The most beautiful scarlet rose from his garden is gripped tightly in his right hand as tears cascade down his face and strike the earth with a splash that echoes like a scream in a cave, piercing the ears of those gathered there to mourn the death of his son.
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.
Both poets, in these works and many others, display a fascination with the death of themselves as well as the death of peers, and loved ones. Both Frost and Dickinson experienced a great deal of death throughout each of their lives. Frost’s greatest loss was the death of his son, which is greatly depicted in his poem “Home Burial.” Dickinson suffered the loss of many friends and family. She spent a lot of her time in her room looking out upon the headstones of these people.