Robert Frost’s dramatic poem Home Burial depicts two tragedies: the loss of an infant and the

Along with the death of a loved one or the loss of a significant piece in one’s life comes a time of mourning. How gradually one heals and recuperates from sorrow is personal and cannot be dictated by another’s schedule. In “Snowbanks North of the House,” one significant component is how Bly uses the natural world to represent the continuation of life after death. “And the sea lifts and falls all night, the moon goes on / through the unattached heavens alone” (Bly 19-20). Nature continues on despite someone’s personal anguish. This poem encourages people to relinquish their agony and to return to normal life because the universe pays no attention to you. Sometimes this is easier said than done, as Gonzalez writes in “1999.” The alleviation of despair is not immediate following loss. As shown in this poem, even years after a tragedy, there are lasting effects on people. The speaker tells of the years that have passed since the sibling’s death. “Then the year / my stomach hurt all year, & then / the year no one spoke of you” (Gonzalez 15-17). The speaker explains that as the years pass, people begin to accept the reality of the death and recover. However, the speaker has a sorrowful tone about him or her. After all the years that have gone by, the speaker continues to feel grief and is heartbroken over the death. The speaker is frustrated that no one else seems to reciprocate the

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

The poem “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” is a poem about a women who has lost her husband of thirty five years. Williams writes in the voice of a grieving woman instead of in his own voice. Now that her husband has died, the widow cannot find joy in her yard that she used to love. The widow may even be considering suicide. Williams, writing in free verse, writes a metaphor comparing the grief of a widow to her blooming yard in the springtime setting a tone of great sadness for the widow.

Robert Frost’s approach to human isolation is always an interesting exploration. His poem of desertion and neglect paired with eternal hopefulness ignite the reader in his poem “The Census-Taker.” All of the elements of a Frost poem are in this particular poem. “The Census-Taker” must be from an earlier time in Frost’s career because the poem is written in an open, free verse similar to the style of his earlier 20th century poetry like “Mending Wall” and “After Apple-Picking.” Also, the language lacks the sophisticated word selection a reader of poetry might find in Wallace Stevens and instead uses simplicity to

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.

In the beginning of the short story, as Brother reflects on Doodle’s life, the author uses personification and foreshadowing to create a mood of remorse. As he gazes out of the window into his backyard, Brother states that “the graveyard flowers were blooming. ...speaking softly the names of our dead” (Hurst 1). The flowers provide flashbacks of the past, and foreshadow a loss of life. The loneliness felt by Brother causes readers to consider how they would feel if their loved one was gone. As Brother observes the seasons, it is noted that “summer was dead but autumn had not yet been born” (Hurst 1). The personifications of the seasons as stages in the cycle of life and death creates an unsure and uncertain mood. The shift between seasons creates an idea of change and uncertainty of events to come. Hurst creates a mood of remorse through

"Home Burial," a dramatic narrative largely in the form of dialogue, has 116 lines in informal blank verse. The setting is a windowed stairway in a rural home in which an unnamed farmer and his wife, Amy, live. The immediate intent of the title is made clear when the reader learns that the husband has recently buried their first-born child, a boy, in his family graveyard behind the house. The title can also be taken to suggest that the parents so fundamentally disagree about how to mourn that their "home" life is in mortal jeopardy—in danger of being buried. Further, Amy, because of her introspective grieving, risks burying both her marriage and her sanity.

Mark Strand’s poem, “Poor North” depicts the life of a married couple facing countless struggles during a harsh winter. It tells of a man working in an unsuccessful store while his wife sits at home, wishing for her old life back. The way the wife copes with her sadness is both intriguing and perplexing. She misses her old life, even though it is described to have not been special; however, the wife may be a person who never feels satisfied or fulfilled by the external world due to internal conflict. Despite the wife’s obvious misery, she stays by her husband’s side and they stroll in the cold together, bracing the wind. As a means of escape from life, she peers into her past in order to find hope in the present.

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.

Robert Frost's deeply-rooted beliefs in nature influence him to view death positively. Through enticing images of solitude

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.

1. Is the husband insensitive and indifferent to his wife’s grief? Has Frost invited us to sympathize with one character more than with the other?

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)

In the nineteenth century, the world of poetry was evolving rapidly, and many American poets were beginning to expand their horizons by breaking the traditional writing methods of conventional poetry. Famous American poets such as Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost tend to focus the central theme of their poetry on the utter truths of society, tragedy, and the reality of life and death. Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost are renowned for their unorthodox poems, which contain many themes relative to love, the natural world, loneliness, and the loss of life. One of Emily Dickinson’s well-known poems is, “Because I could not stop for Death,” which focuses solely on death and its steady, overlooked manifestation. Likewise, Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping

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.