The Presentation of Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry

The Presentation of Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry

Many of Robert Frost's poems contain the vital ingredient of 'nature'.

Frost uses nature as a metaphor, primarily, in his poems to express

the intentions of his poems. He uses nature as a background metaphor

in which he usually begins a poem with an observation of something in

nature and then moves towards a connection to some human situation. He

uses rural landscapes, homely farmers and the natural world to

illustrate this human psychological struggle with everyday situations

that we seem to experience.

Frost uses blank verse in "The Wood-Pile" by using an iambic

pentameter. This is very typical of Frost in his nature poetry. We get

this use of iambic pentameter in "Mending Wall" and "After

Apple-Picking". In "The Wood-Pile", some lines are blank verse, "To

warm the frozen swamp as best it could" However, other lines present

more stress and great irregularity, as in line 26, with its six

stresses and spondaic emphasis on this year's snow, "No runner tracks

in this year's snow looped near it."

In "The Wood-Pile", the speaker sees a bird, which eventually leads

him to the wood-pile. Frost then uses his sense of ambiguity, which he

does to most of his poems. In "The Wood-Pile", the speaker is in

effect taking nature (the bird) as personally communicating with him,

as if nature were concerned with what decision he makes, go back or

keep going on? Perhaps then Frost wanted the reader to convey the

decaying wood-pile as the depth of nature's concern.

The poem sees a man walking through a frozen swamp. He is stuck in a

decision of whether to go ahead or not, nature is forcing him...

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...and recycled bits of poetry. The

interpretation of 'sleep' could be the 'Final sleep' as the sleep of

Woodchuck is the sleep of winter, which metaphorically, in the

language of seasons, has strong associations with death.

In general, nature is described with affection, yet none of the nature

poems are free from hints of possible danger. However, Frost, when

using nature, in his descriptions, is convincingly real. One can

picture the situation; perhaps even feel the 'warmth' of the fire in

"The Wood-Pile". Whichever way you see it, it is evident that nature

plays an important role in Frost's poetry and "The Wood-pile" proves

this and is a typical example of many of his other poems involving

nature, with its blank verse that Frost has created to be his own

using his symbolic language to make the poems more speech-like.