Analysis Of Desert Places By Robert Frost

Robert Frost's 'Desert Places' is a testament to the harrowing nature of solidarity. By subjecting the narrator to the final moments of daylight on a snowy evening, an understanding about the nature of blank spaces and emptiness becomes guratively

     Frost?s poem delves deeper into the being and essence of life with his second set of lines. The first line states, ?Her early leaf?s a flower.? After the budding and sprouting, which is the birth of nature, is growth into a flower. This is the moment where noon turns to evening, where childhood turns into maturity, and where spring turns into summer. At this very moment is the ripe and prime age of things. The young flower stands straight up and basks in the sun, the now mature teenager runs playfully in the light, and the day and sunlight peak before descending ever so quickly into dusk. The second line of the second set states, ?But only so an hour,? which makes clear that yet again time is passing by and that a beginning will inevitably have an end.

Robert Frost is a pastoral poet. His love for rural life revealed in his work. He incorporates major themes: one's life choices, isolation, and nature in his works.

Robert Frost takes our imagination to a journey through wintertime with 
his two poems "Desert Places" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". These two poems reflect the beautiful scenery that is present in the snow covered woods and awakens us to new feelings. Even though these poems both have winter settings they contain very different tones. One has a feeling of depressing loneliness and the other a feeling of welcome solitude. They show how the same setting can have totally different impacts on a person depending on 
their mindset at the time. These poems are both made up of simple stanzas and diction but they are not straightforward poems.

     In the poem Desert Places by Robert Frost, the author describes the scenery in which he came across with. It was on a winter day, and the day was turning into a night. As he went across a field, he saw that the ground was almost all covered in snow. But then he noticed a few weeds and stubble on the ground.

Robert Frost was an American poet that first became known after publishing a book in England. He soon came to be one of the best-known and loved American poets ever. He often wrote of the outdoors and the three poems that I will compare are of that “outdoors” type.

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

Another idea that came up during our discussion is the idea of introversion within the piece. I have always leaned towards being an introvert. I often like to wall myself off from others when I am feeling uncomfortable or not at my best. In the poem, Frost states, “To each the boulders that have fallen to each” (16). This line means that each person deals with his or her own problems. This idea is representative of my own way of thinking. I prefer to keep to myself. In my opinion, it is better to mind your own business than to nose your way into other people’s business. A similar idea of introversion earlier in the poem: “And on a day we meet to walk a line / And set this wall between us once again” (13-14). This is one of the few times that the two characters meet. It is ironic that one of their few interactions is to repair the fence that separates them in the first place. This expresses truly how alone people are as a result of hiding behind their boundaries. It is a representation of the introversion shown in both the poem and myself. I think that Frost’s intention with revealing this is to bring light to the loneliness of living behind a wall. Living behind a wall has its consequences and thus is not always good.

is saying, and Frosts personal pain that he is suffering from that he ingrains into this poem. The

In the poem, “An Old Man’s Winter Night” Robert Frost talks of an old man living in his isolated home. Because of his age, he has trouble remembering where he is and how he got there. Through the use of diction, figurative language, and imagery, Frost accentuates a simple tale of a dying isolated man to reiterate the meaning that it is against human nature to be in isolation and by defying this notion, it causes one to become inhumane and can be the downfall to one’s life. The choice of words in the poem emphasize the old man’s dreariness and separation from humankind.

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)

The dramatic situation of the poem becomes apparent in the second stanza, where Frost details the main conflict between the narrator and society. Although the speaker is currently walking in a city, he is alone, “[looking] down the saddest city lane” and shunning any interactions with other people, such as “the watchman on his beat”

Robert Frost’s poem “Desert Places” diminishes an overall sense of emptiness to being nothing compared to what he holds within himself through the use of connotative diction. Throughout the poem, the description of a cold, dark night is meant to represent the intensity of the depression that Frost was feeling. In the final stanza, Frost reveals that “I have it in me so much nearer home, To scare myself with my own desert places”, “it” being the darkness previously mentioned in the poem. The “desert places” introduced in the final line are a representation of the dark emotions Frost was experiencing, and

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “ The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.

In the second stanza the fact that Frost does not often stop to admire the splendour of nature because of the callings of his duties is clearly conveyed when he writes that his "little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near"; the horse is a creature of habit and is unused to change in its life, the horse could be viewed as a symbol for the mundane and repetitive life Frost leads in society. It is also sad to note that the horse, a creature free and noble creature when in the wild is so accustomed to civilisation that it does not recognise the beauty of nature, its own habitat and can only think of reaching a "farmhouse near." Although here Frost is within the forest and within nature his dutiful mind