Robert Frost Essay

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks,” -Plutarch. Since the first literally named poem in approximately 1682, poetry has become a large and common form of art. Modern amenities, like every piece of music with lyrics are a form of poetry, and some advertisements employ poetry as a jingle. From known celebrities ravaged by time like William Shakespeare, to fairly modern poets like Gary Soto or even Robert Frost, every poet is responsible for the overt quality of their poem, what it conveys, and what it sounds like; the tone (or tones), of a poem. The tone of a poem is a combination of the aforementioned, essentially the mood a poem’s contents create; mere words that can expose vivid and lustrous water, gently brushing one’s feet on the textured sand of a long beach, or eerily ambiguous words that construct a forest under the foot of snow, with a solitary silence hanging above. William Shakespeare, for instance, employs an emphasized use of language to reveal the tone of betrayal in his poem “Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away”. Emphasized uses of language are not the only method to uncloak the tone of a poem, though; Robert Frost, author of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, unveils the multiple tones of his poem through the use of connotation, changes or shifts in his poem, and unequivocal word choices.

What are some of the main conditions that deem a poem a great one? Poetic devices, or “connotation,” is a set of multitudinous devices that alter an unoriginal and uninteresting poem into an entertaining one. Figurative language, the rhyme scheme of a poem, and other poetic devices compose the base contents of this term. Connotation, though mainly used to make a poem entertaining, becomes represented in Fro...

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...isruption are all feelings, and they all compose the tones of Robert Frost’s poem. Poetic devices, shifts, and word choices are merely methods that intend to confront the cowering interpretations, and bring them to light, but what if humans were considered poems or their emotions considered tones? “She chewed her lower lip. ‘If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whole world was swallowed by the sea.'” -Neil Gaiman, Fragile Things. Would connotation, word choices, and shifts than be able to exhibit human emotions? Figurative language, punctuation, and simple word choices revealed the tones of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” with grace, but what would be applicable to humans, if such circumstances existed? As it did so with the many tones of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, it all depends on interpretation.