![]() ![]() “And I suppose I am a brute in that my nature refuses to carry sympathy to the point of going crazy just because someone else goes crazy, or of dying just because someone else dies.” The quote which begins this section comes from a letter by Frost, in which he continues: In a time when a day wasted could be a day without food, extended bereavement was an indulgence. And I suspect that there was something like this in Frost himself – the hard pragmatism of the living. Were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs.įor many readers it’s a chilling close to a boy’s death. Another famous poem is Out, out, which closes: Home Burial isn’t the only poem in which Frost explored grief and bereavement. The first post is the Annotated Home Burial For those to whom this post is new, this is the third and last entry annotating Robert Frost’s Home Burial. The Let Poetry Die post just about buried me. For readers who had been waiting for this final post, if any, sorry it took so long. ![]() He recited a poem at the Inauguration of President Kennedy who had often quoted Frost at the end of his campaign speeches: ‘But I have promises to keep / And miles to go before I sleep’. In his final years, he was honoured and celebrated. ‘The Silken Tent’ opens the sequence and describes the delicate tension between her bondage and freedom, as she is pulled, loosely by her husband in marriage or tightly by Frost in love. ‘Desert Places’ (1936) is a bleak statement of loneliness and despair: Frost’s account of the desert places within himself.Īfter Elinor’s death in 1938, Frost fell in love with a married woman this passion late in life is celebrated in a love sequence in his collection The Witness Tree (1942). The last two poems recorded here were written much later. But the ambivalence is also Frost’s own: ‘I have been pulled two ways and torn in two all of my life’, he said in a letter written at almost the same time. ‘The Road Not Taken’, published in 1916, is partly a teasing comment on the difficulty Thomas had in making decisions about the direction of his life. While in England, Frost became a close friend of the poet Edward Thomas. Yet in the drowsy numbness of apple scent, almost asleep, he becomes aware of the strangeness of familiar things it is an intensely creative state, and in its own way equally draining. The patterns of the poem, its tempo and rhythm, brilliantly suggest that labour has drained the narrator’s energy. ‘After Apple-picking’ also, of course, describes a farming chore. The poem is grounded in the companionable and necessary farm job of helping his neighbour fill in gaps in the wall: the ‘something that does not love a wall’ is actually frost, but the poet plays with the idea that there is a more mysterious force at work. Frost explained that the poem explored ‘the impossibility of drawing sharp lines and making distinctions between good and bad’. In ‘Mending Wall’, the first poem in the second collection, he examines and partly undermines the dull old saying he had seen on an advertisement for a picket fence: good fences make good neighbours. These demonstrated ‘his simple woodland philosophy’, as a reviewer put it at the time, but also gave glimpses of the more troubled spirit to be further expressed in later collections. His first two books of poetry were published during a visit to England with his family from 1912 to 1915. He spent some time at both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but left to farm, learn to make shoes and write. He now attended school regularly and fell in love with a fellow pupil, Elinor White, whom he was eventually to marry. Robert Frost’s early childhood was further disorganised by domestic chaos, frequent moves and patchy education at the age of eleven he tried to offer comfort during the final stages of his father’s death from tuberculosis.īy this time the family had moved to New England to join Robert’s grandparents. His father was an unsuccessful politician and a severe and humourless man he suffered bouts of depression and was often violent. Robert Lee Frost, named after the Confederate general, was born in 1874 in California, nine years after the end of the Civil War. ![]()
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