Isolation and Nature in the Works of Robert Frost
During the height of Robert Frost’s popularity, he was a well-loved poet who’s natural- and simple-seeming verse drew people - academics, artists, ordinary people both male and female - together into lecture halls and at poetry readings across the country.1 An eloquent, witty, and, above all else, honest public speaker, Frost’s readings imbued his poetry with a charismatic resonance beyond that of the words on paper, and it is of little surprise that people gathered to listen. Yet it remains somewhat ironic that his poetry would possess this power to bring individuals together - poetry that, for the most part, contains a prevailing theme of alienation, of a sense of separation from society, of isolation and aloneness in an uncaring world. Running parallel with this is a second theme concerned with the interaction between the human and the non-human: occasionally the ‘non’ may serve as a comfort for the dispossessed - but more often, the interaction between the two is destructive and disastrous. An analysis of a sample of his works - in this case his second book, North of Boston, as well as a few of his later poems - reveals these recurring themes, and the different interpretations Frost brings to them.
It is this variety of interpretations that is fascinating: though his firmly held “. . . belief that everybody was a separate individuality and that collective enterprises could do nothing but weaken the self”2 clearly led to this feeling of loneliness or separation that permeates his works, he does so without falling into a sense of needless pessimism, taking great care to bring out the themes’ multiple aspects under varied contexts. These contexts are: poe...
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...l fireplace - are a little harder to place, though.
7 Another poem, this one outside of North of Boston, that deals with this identical theme is The Tuft of Flowers - except that one emphasis the separationn between the workers, and leaves it ambiguous wether this separation is a good or bad thing.
8 Although there are a few indications of regret/displeasure: his walk is a repentance, his walking is a profanation. And are ‘the cottages in a row’ indeed a sufficient substitution for a companion (‘No one at all with whom to talk...’)?
9 Frost, and specifically North of Boston, lends itself especially well to feminist criticism. With poems such as The Death of the Hired Man, Home Burial, A Servant to Servants, The Generations of Men, The Housekeeper, and The Fear, each of them dialogue pieces, there is an abundance of male/female interaction to be analyzed.
A. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscape of Self. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. 1975. The. 103. - 107. - 103-107. Zverev, A. "A Lover's Quarrel with the World: Robert Frost."
Instructor Mendoza English 1B 22 July 2015. Robert Frost: Annotated Bibliography. Research Question: What are the common themes in Robert Frost's work? Robert Frost is a very successful poet from the 20th century, as well as a four time Pulitzer Prize winner.
Rene Descartes uses the Skeptical method to re-examine everything he knows and form concrete beliefs in the process. In some of his meditations he touches on the body verses mind dichotomy. First, the “body” and “mind/soul” need to be differentiated. Rene Descartes and Simon Blackburn lace definitions of these two entities through their writings. In his second meditation Descartes briefly discusses the difference between the mind and body. Descartes notes that he pulled this thought from his old, misguided days, but it is still useful for defining these two terms, as it gets the essence of difference between them. He writes, “I had a face, hands, arms, and the whole structure of bodily parts that corpses have – I call it the body. The next belief was that I ate and drank, that I moved about, and that I engaged in sense perception and thinking; these things, I thought, were done by the soul” (4). Basically, the main activity of the body is movement and sustenance, while the mind is used for sensing and thinking. Blackburn calls him a substance dualist. He further explains this distinction in discussion Descartes dualism, “thoughts and experiences ate modifications in one kind of stuff; movement and position belongs to the other” (51). The body’s basic function is movement and the mind’s basic function is sensing – one is tangible, while the other is
In conjunction with this theory, any matter is known through the mind. This reasoning was used as a basis toward the dualism of the mind and body. The mind is a thinking entity. It has the ability to imagine, dream, and ultimately encompass the aspects that are not fundamentally matter. The body exists outside the mind. It is the connection to the external world based on the scientific properties of mass, size, shape, and motion. Descartes argues that the mind is distinct from the body. The mind thinks and does not have scientific properties. One’s body is a non-thinking thing. This distinction leads Descartes to conclude that the mind is not the same as the body. There is no characteristic that is categorized as both mind and body; the body can be changed, the mind cannot. In continuation, the mind can exist without the body and the body can exist without the mind since each thing is distinct. Descartes later explains how the brain is not the same as the mind. The brain is the connection between the mind and body in a human being. Descartes argues that matter cannot be the same as anything mental. The mind is affected by the brain, providing one with insight into the external world. Also, the mind can influence the brain, hence one’s body being controlled by the mind. However, it is possible for the brain to cease functionally and the mind to still operate. Essentially, one can conclude that the
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.
Here’s a way to visualize this concept of existing: suppose that everything you think you know about the physical world is false. Instead, there is an evil genius who is
Therefore, in Meditation two in Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes proves to show the distinction between the mind and that of the body. Descartes knows without a doubt that he is a thinking thing who has certain powers such as affirming, denying, sensing, imagining etc. The example that he provided with the piece of wax showed how we could misjudge and come to error when perceiving a thing. Descartes is able to prove that he exists in the same way that he judged the existence of the wax and how he saw it. Most importantly, Descartes comes to the conclusion that the intellect of the mind is what helps distinct and perceive something, rather than other factors.
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
Descartes once said, “I think, therefore I am.” He believed this to be true whenever put forth in our own mind because of the fact that in order to think or doubt, our mind must be doing the thinking or doubting. This idea gives us enough reason that we cannot doubt our own mind. Descartes also believed and studied the idea of mind-body dualism. This is the idea that the mind and brain are two distinct things. He came up with this idea by stating that the brain is made of matter, and the mind is not physically real. The mind is not a physical property in the world, but the brain is a physical object. From this, he determined that the brain and mind are two distinct things. I agree with this statement because the mind is not dependent on information from the body. I believe that Descartes would favor the side of mental phenomena not being able to be explained by reference to physical phenomena because he believes that the mind can live without a body, and he doubts the existence of the minds of other people. I disagree with Descartes about this idea because I believe that the mind needs a body to work, but I agree that the mind is still separate from the body. This idea states that the mind and body are separate, and if they are separate, mental phenomena cannot be explained by physical
The mind which is a non-extended thing, thinking is very different from the body which is a non-thinking thing, an extended and therefore Descartes argues that it is possible for the body to function without the mind and the mind to function without the body (Sorabji, 72). In Descartes theory of mind-body dualism, there exist several theories. Descartes describes the real distinction as the distinction between two things or substances. A substance is something that does not require any other creature to exist since it can occur with God’s concurrence only. Mode, on the other hand, is the affection towards a particular substance. Descartes argues that there are two payoffs for arguing that the mind and body can exist without each other. This includes the religious motivation and provides hope for the immortality of the soul and the second one is the scientific motivation that paves way for the new version of Descartes mechanistic
“Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice./ From what I’ve tasted of desire/ I hold with those who favor fire./ But if it had to perish twice,/ I think I know enough of hate/ To say that for destruction ice/ Is also great/ And would suffice.” This poem by Robert Frost is an excellent example of how even though people tend to think that Frost’s poems are just fun easy to read poems, a lot of them actually have dark themes to them. The poem “Fire and Ice” quoted above is a poem all about death and his prefered way to die/ destroy the world. So, although the average reader will quote Robert Frost as being a poet of positivity, yet many of his poems actually point out the dark side of human existence.
From this place of doubt, Descartes comes to the conclusion that he has no senses, and that body, shape, extension, movement and place are fabrications. This philosophy leaves one wondering if they too do not exist whilst being surrounded by things that seem not to. Descartes approaches this wonder with the fact that the mere perception of one’s own existence in turn proves the existence of their mind. Following this idea, one can conclude that the only aspect of ourselves which definitely exists, is our mind. In a society where the physical body is what determines existence and being, one begins the wonder what they are. This wonder led Descartes to the idea of the mind and the body and how they coexist. He determines that the body is defined as a physical thing and the mind is defined as a thinking thing. Taking into account the previous meditation on senses and dreaming, Descartes determines that the body is almost irrelevant when it comes to observing reality because it is purely based off of senses. Thus, leaving thinking as the only thing inseparable from himself and therefore the only thing determining existence. “Were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist.” (Descartes, 18). This philosophy leads Descartes to the conclusion that one is only a thinking thing, which is defined as a thing that doubts, understands, affirms, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions. The idea that we are just thinking things completely disproves the thought that we can only exist in reality. Descartes says: “My mind enjoys wandering off and will not yet submit to being restrained within the bounds of truth.” (Descartes, 20). If our thoughts and therefore existence can
Life and death are two things that we as humans must all face. The road from one to the other, from life to death, is a long and at times, both joyous and painful one. Robert Frost’s poems are a prime example of these times and trials. The poems I chose for this paper highlight them, and with Frost’s allegory, they present a sort of silver lining to the string of dark and dreary words he’s pieced together for these poems. The depressing tone to the poems “Acquainted with the Night”, “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, and “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowing Evening” could be attributed to the death of many of Frost’s family members, and how despite this he overcame it all, and at the end of his life, was a successful writer. These poems to not go into great explanation of the details of Frost’s life, however, I believe that they are representations of the things path that he’s walked, and how he viewed his actions and death in general.
Kirk, Connie Ann. A Student's Guide to Robert Frost. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow, 2006. Print.
Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost: The Poet and His Poetics. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997. Print.