Robert Frost Home Burial Essay

Beginning the poem with the explanation of how one feels when they first experience someone’s deception, Weslowski chooses words like “mummified” (6) and “morgue” (4) to paint the image of grief and the loss of self-expression through words. Using the term morgue makes the reader

Robert Frost and William Shakespeare have been celebrated by many people because of their ability to express themselves through the written word. Here we are years after their deaths analyzing these fascinating poems about life and death. It’s clear they had similar thoughts about this subject at the time of these writings, even though their characters could not have been more opposite. For both poets, life is too

Death is something that at some point will come to each of us and has been explored in many forms of literature. “The Raven” and “Incident in a Rose Garden” are two poems that explore common beliefs and misconceptions about death. Though both poems differ in setting, tone, and mood there are surprising similarities in the literary tools they use and in the messages they attempt to convey. The setting and mood establish the tone and feel of a poem. In “The Raven” we are launched into a bleak and dreary winters night where a depressed narrator pines for his dead girlfriend.

As one of the most frequently used themes, death has been portrayed and understood differently throughout modern history as well as by poets Christina Rossetti and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in “Remember” and the “Cross of Snow.” It appears in literature as the preeminent dilemma, one that is often met by emotions such as grief, hopefulness, depression, and one that can encompass the entire essence of any writing piece. However, despite Rossetti’s “Remember” and Longfellow’s “Cross of Snow” employing death as a universal similarity, the tones, narratives, and syntaxes of the poems help create two entire different images of what the works are about in the readers’ minds.

Since the date of Robert's birth in 1874, Frost experienced great affliction through his life. On May 5, 1885 his father died of tuberculosis leaving 8 dollars to the family's name at the age of eleven. While married at the age of twenty-one, four of his six children died through their suicide or disease. Irma, Frost's fourth child, out lived frost in a mental hospital. His younger sister Jeanie also bound in a mental hospital had passed in 1929. Lesley, the second child of Frost, out lived Frost, marrying twice and wrote a few children books. Unfortunately, Frost continued to endure loss when his mother and his wife, Elinor, developed cancer passing soon after the diagnosis.

Which of the following words from the poem “Home Burial” give the reader insight into the relationship between the man and woman? Mark all that apply.

"Out, Out," by Robert Frost is a gruesomely graphic and emotional poem about the tragic end of a young boy's life. It is a powerful expression about the fragility of life and the fact that death can come at any time. Death is always devastating, but it is even more so when the victim is just a young boy. The fact that the boy's death came right before he could " Call it a day" (750) leads one to think the tragedy might have been avoided and there by forces the reader to think, "What if." This poem brings the question of mortality to the reader's attention and shows that death has no age limit.

Poetry is a beautiful form of writing that give authors creative freedoms when it comes to symbols, underlying meanings and to evoke whatever emotion they want to from a reader. Robert Service is no exception in his poem “The Cremation of Sam McGee”, a poem about a man that has made a promise to Sam to cremate him if he dies, and the hardships of working in the mountains of Yukon. In Robert Service’s “The Cremation of Tom McGee” he uses a plethora of figurative language, such as similes, alliterations, imagery and personification in order to engage the reader, and give the poem lighthearted feel despite the underlying sadness.

In the poems “Because I Could Not Stop for Death”, by Emily Dickinson and “Home Burial”, by Robert Frost, literary elements are used throughout both poems to get the message the authors are trying to portray. One main important literary element that is used to entice the reader, is symbolism, because it helps the authors describe something without actual describing it. Symbolism is also used because it shows how significant an object is. Characterization is also an important literary technique because it, gives the reader an idea on how the character would act, work, and their values in life. Death is a topic that is used in both poems. Also, every character express their opinion about death differently.

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)

Poems are like snowflakes. While no two are the same, they all have common structures and themes. One prevalent theme in poetry is that of death, which is present in both “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost. Dickinson perceives death as a gentleman, while Frost perceives death as loneliness, which provides insight on how the time periods of the poems, the genders of the authors, and the authors’ personal experiences influence literature.

Robert Frost's poem "Home Burial" is an intriguing portrait of a marital relationship that has gone wrong. Though at first glance it may seem that the cause for the couple's trouble is the death of their child, closer reading allows the reader to see that there are other serious, deeper-rooted problems at work. The couples differences in their approach to grieving is only the beginning of their problems.

In “Home Burial”, Frost is using the characters in the story as a vehicle to play out the hard times he himself encounters when his children died. The story has an uncanny resemblance to his life during the time when he and his wife were dealing with their son’s death.

Robert Frost's "Home Burial" is a tragic poem about a young life cut short and the breakdown of a marriage and family. The poem is considered to be greatly inspired and "spurred by the Frosts' loss of their first child to cholera at age 3" (Romano 2). The complex relationship between husband and wife after their child's death is explored in detail and is displayed truthfully. Among many others, the range of emotions exhibited includes grief, isolation, acceptance, and rejection. The differences in the characters emotions and reactions are evident. The husband and wife in Robert Frost's "Home Burial" react to their son's death in stereotypical fashion and interact with each other with difficulty and resistance.

Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Frost influenced my thorough love of different styles of literature, particularly poetry. To the masses, Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Frost only share job titles, but the two poets share many similarities within their writing. Personally, I read pieces from both authors over the course of my schooling experience. I admired Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken” from a young age, and that particular stole my heart since the first read. “The Raven,” became one of my favorite poems further down my schooling career, with its clear ominous tone that symbolizes much of Poe’s writing. Frost’s and Poe’s works may not seem similar, aside from the section in which their books reside within a library, but their work resembles each other’s quite well. Frost’s writing serves as a better introduction to poetry due to his easily relatable themes, his background connects to everyday audiences, and his use of modern language.