Robert Frost's Home Burial

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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.

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