Desert Places

Frost further points out that the stretch of woods being viewed is very rural. This is made possible by the reference to the location between the woods and frozen lake. In closing the final sentence of the second stanza Frost reiterates the fact that this occurs on “the darkest evening of the year” stating the darkness of the mood.

To analyze the poem better I took each word as if it symbolized a certain characteristic. In lines three and four, "From what I've tasted of desire I hold those who favor fire" it led me to believe that Frost was trying to use desire as a metaphor to fire. Desire, can usually be used a negative or a positive manner depending on the context it's use. In the poem I think that Frost is using it in a negative sense, because he is uses words like end, perish, and destruction in the poem. Negatively the word desire can mean the drive to win or receive something at any cost, the urge for power, which is very destructive. In lines six and nine "I think I know enough of hate to say that for destruction ice is also great and would suffice". Saying that ice is a metaphor to hate. The word hate is worldly known to have a negative condensation. Hate is also

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.

     Last stanza of the poem talks about the emptiness that is so overwhelming that even when Frost looks up to the sky, all that he could see or feel is still loneliness and emptiness. But then Frost mentions that the emptiness or loneliness that he fears the most isn’t the one that exist on

Frost also uses the trees in this poem to represent a way to get away from the cares and trials of life on Earth. He talks of getting away and coming back to start over as if climbing “towards heaven”. He desires to be free from it all, but then he says that he is afraid that the fates might misunderstand and take him away to never return. This is like most of us today. We want to go to Heaven, but we don’t want to die to get there.

In the second stanza it is the semantic field of cold: ‘winter’, ‘ice’, ‘naked’, ‘snow’. All these lexical items give us a feeling of cold which evokes loneliness, unknown, fear.

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

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

The night symbolized death, and the walk was the person's journey to find their lost life. This poem was somewhat disturbing to me. I thought of a lost soul, thirsting to finish a mission that was not completed in life. Frost depicts death in a frightening manner with the contents of this piece of work.

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.

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

Frost’s use of alliteration, personification, and imagery definitely conveyed the speaker’s attitude towards the woods. The reader believes Frost wrote about the woods to show how peaceful and calming it is in an isolated place such as the woods. Most people live in crowded neighborhoods or over-populated places, but living in a secluded area decreases the stress of others outside their household. Because of how isolated the woods are, they can worry about themselves compared to worrying and stressing on the outside

“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”.

As another poetic device and reference to the simile above, Frost uses allegory in lines 15 and 16, specially in line 16: “To the dark and lament”, makes the reader make the conclusion that the above expression, means death, or the border line he felt when he felt choosing to “come in” or not. However, on the last stanza of the poem, he expresses: “But no, I was out for stars; / I would not come in.” these two lines provide the answer to this invitation, and also provide another deeper meaning and metaphor, when he refers to stars as regret to actually committing the

Robert Frost’s nature poetry occupies a significant place in the poetic arts; however, it is likely Frost’s use of nature is the most misunderstood aspect of his poetry. While nature is always present in Frost’s writing, it is primarily used in a “pastoral sense” (Lynen 1). This makes sense as Frost did consider himself to be a shepherd.