Elements In Poetry In Frost's Ghost House By Robert Frost

When it comes to writing, Frost desires two important elements in poetry: easy to recognize images and describing words that rhyme. This combination of sense and sound exist in Frost’s poem “Ghost House” from the collection, A Boy’s Will. Here, the first two lines of the poem meet Frost’s two requirements easily, “I dwell in a lonely house I know That vanished many a summer ago” (Frost 15). Generally speaking, most people can recall a vision of an abandoned home, maybe even an older home that sits empty for a while after a grandparent dies. The smell of the old wood floors, the sight of the overgrown yard or the creaking sounds of the front door, easily come to mind with the two word prompt of “lonely house” (Frost 15), in “Ghost House.”

Frost describes this process eloquently, “Education by poetry is education by metaphor” (Frost 719). According to Frost, in order for this parallel to operate successfully, a poetic metaphor takes on two parts: the author’s will and the reader’s evolution.

Talking first about the author’s will, the writer must consider the strength and weakness of a poetic comparison and ultimately decides how far to push the imaginary boundaries of that analogy. On completion of those steps, the final wording of the piece should express life itself and also urge the reader to think philosophically about the text. Next, the second part concerns the audience’s evolution after reading the text. Incidentally, this part of the metaphor is statistically unpredictable according to Frost, but it is his hope that after reading poetry, the audience develops a closeness to the material at hand. The goal of the second part is for the reader to develop a new found relationship to the poetic metaphor, ultimately leading to fresh, personal beliefs in the areas of: the self, love, and

Earlier, we explored the proposal that poetry teaches with metaphor. Frost suggests that the writer-reader relationship to understanding poetry, works in a similar fashion to the poetry-metaphor process. To break this idea down further, here is the specific job of a writer according to Frost, “His intention is of course a particular mood that won’t be satisfied with anything less than its own fulfillment. But it is not yet a thought concerned with what becomes it” (Frost 788). This quote appears to say that the writer should make the most of their writing opportunity and then turn the final piece over to the reader to see, “if it will take the soft impeachment from a friend” (Frost 786). Subsequently, the reader calls into question the distinct qualities of the poetry, leading the poet to discover if their metaphor is