Robert Frost’s poems “Mending Wall” and “Home Burial” both represent Frost’s attempt to explicate how conflict and lack of communication ultimately leads to despondency and inefficient relationships. These poems explore the fundamental concepts that are necessary to create and maintain a healthy relationship with others, as well as the natural tendencies of humans when reacting to societal issues.
In Frost’s famous poem “Home Burial”, Frost explicates the working relationship of a husband and wife soon after the death of their child. Frost uses a family in the face of adversity to show that men and women grieve in different ways. In the first three lines of this poem “He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.” shows the initial separation between the characters, the wife at the top of the stairs, and the husband at the bottom. Frost included the placement of the characters in the beginning of the poem so the reader could understand the emotional barrier that exists between them. Frost included the words “looking back over her shoulder at some fear” to give a female’s perception of how some problems seem impossible to escape from. Normally we do not look back on what we leave in the past, unless we feel more than fear. The next two lines “She took a doubtful step and then undid it, To raise herself and look again” Frost wants the reader to key in on the fact that her attention is elsewhere, perhaps, outside the house. Her husband becomes impatient “What is it you see From up there always—for I want to know” and several lines later stresses his impatience with “I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.” The husband’s tone has turned demanding, adding unnecessary pressure to the situation. The wife becomes annoyed with her husband’s nagging attempts to communicate with her, “She, in her place, refused him any help With the least stiffening of her neck and silence. She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see” The husband notices their child’s grave from the window, “Just that I see.”, “You don’t,” she challenged. She views her husband as a “blind creature”, or as someone who cannot attempt to sympathize, because
In life, many people have parts that they let people see of them, and other parts that they keep hidden. Many times, we build these walls to shut people out so people can never really see what is going on inside. These “walls” keep many of one’s deepest secrets hidden. In the poem, The Mending Wall, by Robert Frost, shows a mindset of two neighbors who continue to adjust and mend their wall between each other. This idea of confinement is seen throughout the poem to show that the neighbor is trying to protect themselves. This creates speculation upon the speaker of what exactly are they trying to hide. One might see this poem as meaning a physical barrier, but this is more of an emotional “wall” or barrier that this poem creates. In the poem,
Frost’s various speaking tones can be shown in his well-known poem “Mending Wall.” Throughout the poem the speaker’s voice is open and relaxed, yet, inward and musing. It helps welcome the reader and at the time entices the reader into a riddle which becomes essential to the poem’s meaning. The speaker’s eventual speculation about what might not “love a wall” becomes a description of the struggle of wall-mending and begins to wonder why he and his neighbor have met to carry out the task in the first place. The speaker’s range of tone throughout the poem varies from seriousness to fantasy to glee.
In his poem 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost presents to us the thoughts of barriers linking people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers. His messages are conveyed using poetic techniques such as imagery, structure and humor, revealing a complex side of the poem as well as achieving an overall light-hearted effect. Robert Frost has cleverly intertwined both a literal and metaphoric meaning into the poem, using the mending of a tangible wall as a symbolic representation of the barriers that separate the neighbors in their friendship.
“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost, the fifty-six line lyric poem gives off a sarcastic tone that expresses impatience with his neighbor and the “wall.” The poem focuses on a theme of separation, the necessity of boundaries and the illusory arguments used to annihilate them.
It can be difficult for a persona to understand a different perspective. The 1914 blank verse poem, Home Burial, by Robert Frost explores the death of a child and the consequences of this disturbing event on a mother and father. The poem is set at the burgeoning of WWI in pre-war western society. At its core this text explores the gender stereotypes of its time. The mother and father embody the two differing representations of grief over their child’s death. After a brief introduction, the text consists of mostly dialogue which gives the audience an insight into the emotional rift between two personas and their different experiences in dealing with the emotional consequences of death. The husband questions the emotional response of his wife using a demanding tone, desperate to try and understand the reasons for her longing actions “What is it you see From up there always- for
Robert Frost is describing a process in "Mending Wall", which is repairing a wall that separates his territory and his neighbor's. The wall was deteriorated during the winter, when the cold frost created cracks and gaps in the wall. He uses a nearly infantile imagination to unravel the mystery of the damage that appeared suddenly in spring. While they are tediously laboring to reconstruct the fence, Frost is imploring his neighbor about the use of the wall; his apple trees can be clearly distinguished from his neighbor's pine trees. Yet underneath this quotidian routine, Frost goes beyond the surface to reveal its figurative meaning.
Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial,” written in 1914, centers around the conversation of a married couple whose relationship is struggling after the death of their young child. A duality in meaning exists in the poem’s title, “Home Burial,” which references not only the death of their child but also the death of their marriage. Is the child’s death the sole cause of their marital distress? Robert Frost opens the poem in the couple’s home with the husband watching as his wife, Amy, begins to descend the staircase (1-2). After a few verses, the audience has become witnesses to the marriage’s descent into nothingness. The child’s grave lies forever in the background, framed by a small window at the top of the stairs (Frost 24-31). In Robert Frost’s “Home Burial”, the marriage of Amy and her husband is irreparable due to differences in expression, acceptance, and perception.
Robert Frost's "The Mending Wall" is a comment on the nature of our society. In this poem, Frost examines the way in which we interact with one another and how we function as a whole. For Frost, the world is often one of isolation. Man has difficulty communicating and relating to one another. As a result, we have a tendency to shut ourselves off from others. In the absence of effective communication, we play the foolish game of avoiding any meaningful contact with others in order to gain privacy.
Robert Frost had a fascination towards loneliness and isolation and thus expressed these ideas in his poems through metaphors. The majority of the characters in Frost’s poems are isolated in one way or another. In some poems, such as “Acquainted with the Night” and “Mending Wall,” the speakers are lonely and isolated from their societies. On other occasions, Frost suggests that isolation can be avoided by interaction with other members of society, for example in “The Tuft of Flowers,” where the poem changes from a speaker all alone, to realizing that people are all connected in some way or another. In Robert Frost’s poems “Acquainted with the Night,” “Mending Wall,” and “The Tuft of Flowers,” the themes insinuate the idea of loneliness
Robert Frost is an iconic poet in American literature today, and is seen as one of the most well known, popular, or respected twentieth century American poets. In his lifetime, Frost received four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry, and the Congressional Gold Medal. However, Robert Frost’s life was not always full of fame and wealth; he had a very difficult life from the very beginning. At age 11, his father died of tuberculosis; fifteen years later, his mother died of cancer. Frost committed his younger sister to a mental hospital, and many years later, committed his own daughter to a mental hospital as well. Both Robert and his wife Elinor suffered from depression throughout their lives, but considering the premature deaths of three of their children and the suicide of another, both maintained sanity very well. (1)
Many of Robert Frost’s poems and short stories are a reflection of his personal life and events. Frost’s short story “Home Burial” emulates his experience living on a farm and the death of two of his sons. Frost gives an intimate view into the life and mind of a married couples’ struggle with grief and the strain it causes to their marriage. The characters Frost describes are synonymous, physically and emotionally, to his own life events.
Poetry is a literary medium which often resonates with the responder on a personal level, through the subject matter of the poem, and the techniques used to portray this. Robert Frost utilises many techniques to convey his respect for nature, which consequently makes much of his poetry relevant to the everyday person. The poems “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ and “The mending wall” strongly illuminate Frost’s reverence to nature and deal with such matter that allows Frost to speak to ordinary people.
More times than none, authors write concealed meanings that they want the reader to discover. Like Norman N. Holland describes “literary criticism is about books and psychoanalysis is about minds” (Holland), psychoanalytical criticism focuses more on the mind of the reader and author, rather than the word for word meaning of the sentences. With Mending Walls, Robert Frost wrote it in an open style of poetry; not focusing on rhymes, but constructing each sentence with ten syllables. Nevertheless, Frost intents to catch the attention of the reader by intentionally making ten sentences throughout the poem into eleven syllables. This essay will intend to discover the hidden meaning that Robert Frost
In Roberts, Mending Wall, he expresses the alienation within our society. This story was and is very controversial throughout history. Written in 1914, it became widely known for its connection with racism and segregation. In 1960, Frost was asked to read it for President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. In JFK’s inauguration speech, he declared, “We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom”(Kennedy), which shows how he felt about segregation. This created a skirmish throughout the U.S., because this poem was so controversial. The poem, which was a memory when Frost was a young boy, consists of him walking the line. Walking the line means picking up rocks that had falling from the ice melting, recreating the fence between you and your neighbor. Frost suggests alienation in this story by using symbolism of the lines between African Americans and white folk. In the poem he asks the question, “Why do they make good neighbors”(line 30)? An interpretation of this line is that he is asking the question, ‘why do we have these lines between our people? There is no reasons to have these lines separating us?’. The poem suggests that we get into routines and then never break them because we have done them for generations. Frost challenges this, asking questions that are very hard to answer.