Comparing Kinnell And Robert Frost

      Poets use imagery to convey meaning, feelings, and emotions. The contemporary poet best know for his use of imagery is Robert Frost. The Road Not Taken, opened the eyes of poetic readers and critics to Frost’s artistic creations. He uses forms of language such as diction and syntax to capture and move the reader.

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.

The common themes of my selected poems is to live your life so you don’t ever look back on it and wish you did more. None of the poems clearly said this. “O Me! O Life!” has a theme that you should make your life worth it so you don’t feel like it was wasted at any point. “What Is Life?” says that life goes by fast, so you have to enjoy and appreciate every little thing while you still can. “Ignorant Before The Heavens Of My Life” wants people to make their mark on the world by being unique and doing something special with your life. All of these singular themes blend smoothly to provide an overall theme of the three together.

Frost uses several techniques in his poem, but perhaps the most significant is his use of the metaphor. First, he describes “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (1). The roads represent the different choices that people have to make in life and how there isn’t always one choice to be made. Each path is an important decision which he must make, so he has to choose carefully when examining each path. When he “looked down one as far as (he) could to where it bent in the undergrowth” (4-5), this represents him not being able to predict and see the future. The forest represents the unknown, and he cannot see or predict his unknown future. One may think that his choice

The discursive blank-verse meditation "Birches" does not center on a continuously encountered and revealing nature scene; rather, it builds a mosaic of thoughts from fragments of memory and fantasy. Its vividness and genial, bittersweet speculation help make it one of Frost's most popular poems, and because its shifts of metaphor and tone invite varying interpretation it has also received much critical discussion, not always admiring. The poem moves back and forth between two visual perspectives: birch trees as bent by boys' playful swinging and by ice storms, the thematic interweaving being somewhat puzzling. The birches bent "across the lines of straighter darker trees" subtly introduce the theme of

The irony of the poem is within in the language and creates contradicting ideas that the speaker can make any noise in the house, but only sexual noises wake the child. There are not any big words to try and confuse the reader, but with this the important words are hidden in this plan language. The senses are defiantly appealed to in this poem, “touch” is ironically an important word. When the spouses are done making love they are touching one another as “he appears” ready to snuggle. Touch comes up several times in the poem and always is used in a sensual and vivid way. “touch arms across his little, startlingly muscled body”, “Touching along the length of our bodies”, “Familiar touch of the

“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”.

Therefore, in the second stanza “Too dark in the woods for a bird,” (line 5), he uses this imagery to express that even birds cannot live in the woods because of how much darkness is present. Birds singing resemble happiness, and the woods and its darkness are showing two scenes contradicting each other, showing in some way the deeper meaning beyond the literal one. Another symbol used by Frost was light, symbolizing hope: “The last of the light of the sun.” In this line he gives a clue to the reader expressing how even though it was dark, there could still be a chance for light to come in those woods for some hope and maybe

As a child, one plays on the playground. The adventures happen amongst the swings. The escape and journey through the air causes the mind to wander and dream. The same way the speaker in Birches by Robert Frost uses his imagination to think of the dangling birches to be caused by a child at play. The feeling of going back and forth gives one the feeling of leaving earth for a little while and soaring above the trees. Feet towards the heavens and the feeling of one’s stomach dropping on the way down, gives a sense of release. As one goes through hard times, they look for that release from the world. The desire to get away is released through swinging to then be pulled back to earth. This same feeling was felt in Birches as a young boy rides

In “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” Frost uses a voice that recognizes how humanity has somehow forgotten nature, it is a mourning for the natural world. The speaker displays some disdain for the responsibilities at home. For example, the speaker laments how, “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep,” which show how the speaker desires to stay and look over the beautiful scenes of nature but cannot because of accountabilities at home (13-14). The speaker exhibits a longing for inner peace; however, the speaker cannot achieve what this peace because of “promises” or responsibilities that the speaker holds in his/her life, (13-14). The responsibilities may also be attributed to the ringing of the bells, which are on the horse of the speaker’s carriage, symbolizing as a reminder for what the speaker still needs to do before taking time to observe the woods. The speaker is taking time to notice the implied

The meaning that Frost is portraying is not obvious by the title of this poem. This poem is not literal it is meant to be metaphorical. Frost Personifies nature to have life-like traits. The title does not give you an idea of what the poem is about or what the poem means.

The power of the poet is not only to convey an everyday scene into a literary portrait of words, but also to interweave this scene into an underlying theme. The only tool the poet has to wield is the word. Through a careful placement and selection of words, the poet can hopefully make his point clear, but not blatantly obvious. Common themes of poems are life, death, or the conflicting forces thereto. This theme could never possibly be overused because of the endless and limitless ways of portraying life or death through the use of different words.

Several similes are used in the poem. One is the presentation of the neighbor grasping stones in each hand “like an old-stone savage armed.” This creates a vision of a rustic and unimaginative neighbor stuck in his ideas like someone from the Stone Age. The stone-age is tied to mere survival without any beauty or imagination. The neighbor lives in such a rut. Frost uses trees as a metaphor to define himself and his neighbor: “He is all pine and I am apple orchard.” The apple orchard is productive as well as beautiful. The pine trees exist and do not produce such a beautiful fruit. Pine trees are sturdy and unimaginative, like the neighbor.

On the surface, the poem "Birches" by Robert Frost is simply about a man who would like to believe that birch trees are bent from young boys swinging on them, despite the evidence that it is merely a result of the ice-storms. Even with this knowledge he prefers the idea of the boys swinging from the trees because he was a birch swinger years ago and continuously dreams of returning and experiencing those pleasant memories once again. From a more explored and analytical point of view, the birch trees symbolize life and serves as the speaker 's temporary channel of escape from the world and its harsh realities. The speaker uses his imagination to return to his innocent childhood. He hopes to relieve stress and prepare to face life and

Robert Frost said many times throughout his life that all men share a common bond. In his poem “The Tuft of Flowers” he analyzes the potential of such a bond, in first person. Frost turns an everyday common job, into discovering a common bond with another laborer. The author uses a comparison between aloneness with a sense of understanding to demonstrate his theme of unity between two men. In another one of Frost’s poems “Birches” he imagines walking through the woods looking at all the trees, and seeing the top bending towards the ground. When he sees this he imagines they are bending from kids swinging on them, rather then what is really happening to them. It can be analyzed that Frost had a very definitive appreciation for nature, and a very broad imagination.