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Bond & Free Analysis

Decent Essays

Bond & Free Analysis

“Bond and Free” by Robert Frost personifies two entities “Love” and “Thought” as if they exist and exhibit qualities of human beings, rather than being effects of the human heart and mind. Frost uses capitalization to begin each entity as if each were formal given names of each entity.

Frost begins by referring to Love. Love is described as being grounded and clinging to the earth. It has “circling arms about”. With these descriptions, Frost conveys that Love is needy and dependent on others. It lives in fear of being torn from the one it love. Frost indicates that Love has “Wall within wall to shut fear out”. With this imagery, Frost portrays love as a prison that keeps others out and protects those that are …show more content…

Thought is described in stanza three as escaping the bonds of earth and drifting into the solar system at night. In nighttime dreams, Thought does not have to be tied to the realities of earth. In one’s dreams, one can escape and look down upon the world and not appear to be a part of the “interstellar gloom”. Frost’s use of words such as gloom convey that reality is not something desirable, but rather something to escape. In the light of day, reality sets in again and Thought must retrace its steps to earth. Frost uses the imagery of Sirius’ disc to illustrate that Thought is the brightest star in the night sky.

If earth represents where Love resides, the heavens represent where Thought resides. In the final stanza, Frost concludes the poem by respecting what Thought builds in the heavens, but realizes there is value in Love as well.

Beginning in stanza three, Thought begins to be personified as male with the use of the pronouns him and his. This creates the juxtaposition of Love as being a female characterization. Symbolically then Frost is proposes men as being the logical thinkers, who long for escape from the entrapment of Love or the female figure. Females long to cling to the man and hold him too close. Most of the time men are searching for something else outside of the gloom of entrapment by a woman. In the concluding stanza, Frost then reveals that perhaps Love is “fused in another star”. This would indicate that Love might be its

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