Assignment: Highlight the themes of Robert Frost’s poems

Subject: American Literature

Submitted by: Rida
Roll no: FS_16001
BS English 8th semester
Submitted to: ma’am Anila

Introduction
Robert Frost (1874-1963) was the most popular poet of twentieth century. He was born in San
Francisco, California on Mar 26, 1874. He is a well-known modern poet. He is generally
regarded as a poet, teacher, and a man of wisdom. Many Americans recognize his name, the
titles of and lines from his best-known poems and even his face and the sound of his voice. He
was awarded Pulitzer Prize four times. Despite his popular image as a farmer-poet, those ten
years, which he spent after his grandfather’s death, were the only period of Frost's life in which
he worked seriously at farming, and in the last five of them he also found it financially necessary
to teach school.
He had a profound knowledge of literature, history, science and philosophy. Hence he can be
termed as classicist of very high order. Frost neither describes the situations and conditions of
life of modern society, nor does he write about political and economic problems of his age. He
does not aloof himself from the contemporary society. He has penetrated from social actions to
intellectual problems of his age.
He was a poet who spoke with rhyme and meter of all things natural, and in so doing plumbed
the depths of emotions of people in all walks of life. Louis Untermeyer best describes Frost's
work as "poetry that sings and poetry that talks ... his poems are people talking" (xxi). In
describing a simple act of nature, the mundane, or the heartfelt grief of people, Robert Frost
displays an insight into the sometimes simple instances in our lives that when brought together
constitute our very lives. One aspect of life that touches everyone is death, whether it is the loss
of a friend, neighbor, or beloved one. Some of Frost's most beautiful work displays this stark
reality of life. Robert Frost is one of few poets in English literature that shall never become
outdated because poetry is an echo of every sensitive man’s experiences and his limitations. The
main theme of his poetry is the despairing state of man in his life. In all of Frost's works, the
reader sees encapsulated in verse, a depth and level of human emotion that is not easily discerned
by the eye, but rather felt and nurtured in the heart. Frost uses nature at its most beautiful to
explain life at its harshest.
Behind the largely unruffled public facade was a personal life of great stress and sorrow.
None of the traumatic experiences of his personal life found their way directly into Frost's
poetry. To the broad public, Frost may be a painter of charming postcard scenes and a front-
porch philosopher dispensing consolation and cracker-barrel wisdom, but behind these
stereotypes there is in Frost's work a tragic and (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) a terrifying poet,
whose deepest note is one of inevitable human isolation.
In a life more painful than most, Frost struggled heroically with his inner and outer
demons, and out of that struggle he produced what many consider to be the single greatest body
of work by any American poet of the twentieth century. He uses traditional forms and structures
while exploring modern themes of alienation and isolation. Throughout his poetry, we find
motifs of seasons, alternation of night and day, natural phenomenon and rural images. Frost’s
poetry is commented on as:
“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom, begins as a lump in the throat, a sense
of wrong, homesickness, lovesickness. No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”

Nature:
The omnipresence of nature in frost’s poetry can very well be felt in the mountains that
rear high above man’s head; in the curve of valleys; in the leaf-strewn roads; in the crowding of
trees; singly or in dense dark woods; in the blooming of turf flowers; in the brooks that race
downhill; in the happy description of seasonal changes, taking care not to leave to minute detail
concerning the changes the earth wears. The cycle of growth, the light giving way for darkness,
the parade of stars firing man’s aspiration all go hand in hand to frame Frost’s memorable world,
where he touches man’s life at all points. Nature can at once be a destroyer, causing frustration
and disappointment. Frost driving a middle path seems to declare, that man’s relation to nature is
also both together and apart. In nature, Frost discloses the presence of both the friend and foe:
There is much in nature against us. But we forget:
Take nature altogether since time began,
Including human nature, in peace and war,
And it must be a little more in favor of man
Say a fraction of one percent at the very least.
Nature is a dominant theme in the poetry of Frost, but he is not a Nature-poet
in the tradition of Wordsworth or Thomas Hardy. He is a nature poet of a different
kind. His best poetry is concerned with the drama of man in Nature, whereas
Wordsworth is generally best when emotionally displaying the natural world. Frost
himself said in 1952:”I guess I’m not a Nature poet. I have only written two poems
without a human being in them.” In the epitaph that Frost proposed for himself, he
said that he had “a lover’s quarrel with the world”. This lover’s quarrel is Frost’s
poetic subject and throughout his poetry there are evidences of this view of man’s
existence in the natural world. His attitude towards nature is once of armed and
amicable truce and mutual respect. His descriptions of the natural objects are
characterized by accuracy and minuteness. In “Birches”, we get a concrete and
faithful description of the ‘habit’ of birches and how they react to a storm:
When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
 I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
---------------They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Frost’s love of nature is more comprehensive, many sided and all-inclusive than that of
Wordsworth. Wordsworth loved to paint only the spring-time beauty of nature, or what
Coleridge called “Nature in the groove”, but Frost has an equally keen eye for the sensuous and
the beautiful in nature, as well as for the harsher and the unpleasant.
Frost also sees in nature; rather, it is they which give his song birds, wild flowers, brooks
and tress their poignant appeal. The charm of many of the nature-lyrics results from the vividness
with which sweet, delicate things stand out against the somber background. “You cannot have
the one without the other love of natural beauty and horror at the remoteness and the
indifference of physical world, are not opposite but different aspects of the same view.”
Man is not idealistically integrated with nature and so Frost shows man as lonely in the
midst of nature, as in Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening; Wordsworth’s man is not
completely alone, as in Daffodils. Brower writes, “Frost’s speaker, by being so surely fixed in
the physical world, the neutralized nature of the late nineteenth and twentieth century, is
much more surely alone.”
Frost places a great deal of importance on Nature in all of his collections. Because of the
time he spent in New England, the majority of pastoral scenes that he describes are inspired by
specific locations in New England. However, Frost does not limit himself to stereotypical
pastoral themes such as sheep and shepherds. Instead, he focuses on the dramatic struggles that
occur within the natural world, such as the conflict of the changing of seasons (as in "After
Apple-Picking") and the destructive side of nature (as in "Once by the Pacific"). Frost also
presents the natural world as one that inspires deep metaphysical thought in the individuals who
are exposed to it (as in "Birches" and "The Sound of Trees"). For Frost, Nature is not simply a
background for poetry, but rather a central character in his works.
Throughout Frost’s work, speakers learn about themselves by exploring nature, but
nature always stays indifferent to the human world. In other words, people learn from nature
because nature allows people to gain knowledge about themselves and because nature requires
people to reach for new insights, but nature itself does not provide answers. Frost believed in the
capacity of humans to achieve feats of understanding in natural settings, but he also believed that
nature was unconcerned with either human achievement or human misery. Indeed, in Frost’s
work, nature could be both generous and malicious. The speaker of “Design”, for example,
wonders about the “design of darkness” that has led a spider to kill a moth over the course of a
night. While humans might learn about themselves through nature.

Man in Frost’s poetry:

Robert Frost while pondering a lot over man as an individual emphasizes that in spite of
the amiable socialization of man, he is basically single and alone with his fate. To him life covers
both possibility of terror and potential of beauty. Man must educate himself to know which it is
to be. It becomes the primary task of a man to understand him and his place in this world. This
can be achieved by observation and self-analysis. Repetitive portrayals of harvest and mowing
and in particular, poems upon abandoned dwellings can be taken as evidence for Frost’s belief in
man’s hapless position in the ever changing world. Within the terribly limited period of
existence, he is destined to face the changes that take place in almost everything around him. The
nature cycles preach man that he is no inevitable end, which shatters off all his hopes and
dreams. The thing that can’t be altered must be understood and accepted. Frost stresses in
Acceptance, that man must learn to bow and accept the ‘end’.
“Let what will be, be.”
Among the various themes of Frost, man’s relationship to his fellows can be considered
as an interestingly significant one as it comprises of both apartness and togetherness. Frost
strongly advocates individualism. Man caught within the boundaries laid by nature, strives to
achieve with whatever talents he has been granted. Frost thinks if man is isolated, he can’t be
achiever. This isolation might lead man to egocentrism or even to lonely madness. Frost always
being a moderator tries to achieve an ideal reconciliation between the individual and the group.
Frost’s observation regarding man’s relationship to man is quite opposing. For
instance, The Turf of Flowers speaks of the bond that lies between the individuals effecting
universal brotherhood:
Men work together, I told him from the heart,
Whether they work together or apart.
In most of his poems, we find Frost’s people are quite willing to offer a friendly hand. A
Time to Talk presents the farmer who responds to the invitation of his neighbor for a friendly
talk, without any inhibitions.
When a friend calls to me from the road
-------------------------------------
I don’t stand still
---------I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

Isolation
In several Frost’s poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and
encounter another individual, an object, or an animal. These encounters stimulate moments of
revelation in which the speaker realizes his or her connection to others or, conversely, the ways
that she or he feels isolated from the community. Some poems feature speakers who actively
choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more about themselves, while the other return
focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and community only heighten loneliness and
isolation. This deeply pessimistic, almost misanthropic perspective sneaks into the most cheerful
of late Frost poems.
The majority of the characters in Frost’s poems are isolated in one way or another. Even
the characters that show no sign of depression or loneliness, such as the narrators in The Sound
of Trees or Fire and Ice, are still presented as detached from the rest of society, isolated because
of their unique perspective. The old-style farmer in Mending Wall not only refuses to pull down
the useless barriers but, to make matters worse, insists upon having the last word:
“Good fences make good neighbors”.
The girl in The Fear of Man, who walks breathlessly at midnight to her home,
symbolizes man’s thronging for warmth and reassurance. The timid professor in A Hundred
Collars, his unwarranted suspicion resulting up in isolation, dramatize a familiar human conflict.
The struggle between the need for companionship and the innate fear of the unfamiliar becomes
quite prominent. He dislikes isolation, but he sees its inevitability.
 A concern with barrier is the predominant theme in Frost’s poetry. Man is always
erecting and trying to bring down barriers----between man and man, between man and
environment. To Frost, these barriers seem favorable to mutual understanding and respect. Frost
insists on recognizing these barriers instead of trying to tear them down as in the modern trend.
And he even builds them wherever necessary.

Barrier between man and the universe:

First, there is the great natural barrier, the void, the space, which separates man from the
stars. Man foolishly tries to bridge this gap, but all his efforts in this respect are of no avail. Such
efforts only make him more conscious of his own littleness. In the poem entitled Stars, the poet
tells us how man gets attracted by nature only to be disillusioned by it. Here, the stars shining in
the sky at midnight do not lend any glory or state to the gazer. Rather, they produce a note of
disenchantment:
“And yet with neither love nor hate
Though the stars like some snow-white
Mine roars snow like marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
In another poem, we find how clever human plans to establish relationship with nature
are thwarted. The protagonist of The Star-Splitter, purchases a telescope with the insurance
money that he gets by burning his house down. He gazes at the stars but cannot escape the
question that raises its ugly head towards the end:
We have looked and looked
But after all where are we?

Barrier between man and nature:

Secondly, there are the barriers, between man and the immediate natural world,—the
barren and desert places—which man must conquer, reclaim and cultivate. He must constantly
wage a war against such wildernesses, if he is to survive in an environment which seems hostile
to him, which at least, is not meant for him and in which he is an alien. Says Marion
Montgomery, "there are those souls, of course, who are content to have a barrier stand as a
continual challenge which they never quite accept; such is the old teamster of The Mountain
who lives and works in the shade of the mountain he always intends to climb but never does.
And there are those who accept the challenge and go down in defeat; the deserted village of
the Census Taker with its gaunt and empty buildings is evidence of such failure”. The woman
in A Servant to Servants has lost out to the wilderness by losing her sanity. Her days are spent in
caring for the house while the men are away, and the emptiness of the world has overcome her.
There are others on the border line of tragic failure. The Hill Wife, though not out of her mind,
still has a fear of her house once she has left it, deserted it, and has to return to it. When she
comes back she has to reconquer it:
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight.
 Courage is needed to reclaim at home. In Generations of Men the boy and girl meet for
the first time at the ruins of an old home place, sit on the edge of the cellar, and talk about
families and the decayed places. In the end they are in love, or about to fall in love, and have
made a pact to return and rebuild the old home place. Alone and helpless as he is, man must
wage a constant war against his physical environment which is inimical to human existence.

Barrier between man and man:

Fourthly, there are barriers which separate man from man. Such barriers come in the way
of social communication and lack of communication leads to social alienation and emotional
isolation and loneliness. Mending Wall is an ironic comment on those who raise walls between
themselves and their neighbors, because they think, "good fences make good
neighbours". Read symbolically, the poem is a comment on racial, religious, national and
ideological barriers which divide and separate man from man. Such barriers come to the way of
human relationship; generate tensions, which result in neurosis and emotional imbalance verging
on insanity. North of Boston is full of such emotionally isolated and alienated people. In
the Home Burial there is a grievous lack of communication between the husband and the wife,
and the mother's grief deepens into insanity. The shadow of their dead child is the barrier which
divides them and alienates them from each other.  The essential loneliness of the human spirit is
also expressed convincingly in poems like Acquainted with the Night, An Old Man's Winter
Night, Stopping by Woods, etc.
 Provide, Provide evokes an agonizing emotion of alienation which no amount of
bantering can attenuate or overcome. No one can miss the pronounced tragic tone of the ironic
lines:
Die early and avoid the fate
Or if predestined to die late
Make up your mind to die in state.

The end