Themes of Robert Frost's Poetry

                 Major themes of Robert Frost’s poetry

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 Robert Frost is one of few poets in English literature that shall never become outdated because poetry is an echo of every sensitive man’s experiences and his limitations.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.

“With his down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being burdened with pedantry”.

Robert Frost’s chief concern is with man. The focus in his poetry is on man’s position and attitude and especially on his feelings. Robert Frost reveals a good deal about his conception of universe and external reality in his poetry. But what is important to him? It is man’s thought, emotions and behavior as they determine or reflect his relationship with the universe. What does man do, and how does he feel in a universe as dark as this? That is the central question for Robert Frost. The answer is found largely by the fact that man is sharply limited as Robert Frost sees him. Man is limited both in his intellectual power and his awareness and understanding. He has a different way of seeing this universe. He is different in his thought and in his intellectual power.

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.

The Otherness of Nature:

Thirdly, Man's physical existence itself is a barrier which divides man from the soul or spirit of nature. While Wordsworth denied the very existence of barriers between man and nature, for Frost a wide gulf separates man and nature, spirit and matter. In a number of poems he stresses the otherness and indifference of Nature, and shows that it is futile to expect any sympathy from the spirit of soul which moves or governs the world. Individual man and the forces of nature are two different principles, and the boundaries which separate them must be respected. A Minor Bird also stresses the active barriers between man and nature. The poet is bored by the bird which sings at his window and wishes it away:

I have wished the bird would fly away,

And not seen by me have of day

Have clapped my hands at him from the door

When it seemed as if I could hear no more--

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.

Isolation/Separateness from God:

Fifthly, man's reason and intellect is the barrier that alienates him from God, his Maker. His rational bias deprives him of the bliss of communion with God. The theme of the Masque of Reason is that reason combined with faith alone can lead to understanding and wisdom. It is only through faith that man can work out his own salvation and make life agreeable.

Though barriers and alienation loom large in the poetry of Frost, it does not mean that he is against democracy or the brotherhood of man. Speaking psychologically, Frost’s concern with loneliness is an expression of his intensely felt need for human love, sympathy and fellowship.

Communication:

Communication or the lack thereof, appears as a significant theme in several of Frost's poems, as Frost presents it as the only possible escape from isolation and despair. Unfortunately, Frost also makes it clear that communication is extremely difficult to achieve. For example, in "Home Burial," Frost describes two terrible events: the death of a child and the destruction of a marriage. The death of the child is tragic, but inability of the husband and wife to communicate with each other and express their grief about the loss is what ultimately destroys the marriage. Frost highlights this inability to communicate by writing the poem in free verse dialogue; each character speaks clearly to the reader, but neither is able to understand the other. Frost explores a similar theme in "Acquainted with the Night," in which the narrator is unable to pull himself out of his depression because he cannot bring himself even to make eye contact with those around him. In each of these cases, the reader is left with the knowledge that communication could have saved the characters from their isolation. Yet, because of an unwillingness to take the steps necessary to create a relationship with another person, the characters are doomed.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

-----------------------------

But not to call me back or say good-bye

                                     (Acquainted with night)

Everyday Life:

Frost is very interested in the activities of everyday life, because it is this side of humanity that is the most "real" to him. Even the most basic act in a normal day can have numerous hidden meanings that need only to be explored by a poetic mind. For example, in the poem "Mowing," the simple act of mowing hay with a scythe is transformed into a discussion of the value of hard work and the traditions of the New England countryside. As Frost argues in the poem, by focusing on "reality," the real actions of real people, a poet can sift through the unnecessary elements of fantasy and discover "Truth". Moreover, Frost believes that the emphasis on everyday life allows him to communicate with his readers more clearly; they can empathize with the struggles and emotions that are expressed in his poems and come to a greater understanding of "Truth" themselves.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

--------------          --------------              ----------

Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

Isolation of the Individual:

This theme is closely related to the theme of communication. 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. In some cases, the isolation is a far more destructive force. For example, in "The Lockless Door," the narrator has remained in a "cage" of isolation for so many years that he is too terrified to answer the door when he hears a knock. This heightened isolation keeps the character from fulfilling his potential as an individual and ultimately makes him a prisoner of his own making. Yet, as Frost suggests, this isolation can be avoided by interactions with other members of society; if the character in "The Lockless Door" could have brought himself to open the door and face an invasion of his isolation, he could have achieved a greater level of personal happiness.

It went many years,

But at last came a knock,

And I thought of the door

With no lock to lock.

----------         -----------     

So at a knock

I emptied my cage

To hide in the world

And alter with the cage.

Duty:

Duty is a very important value in the rural communities of New England, so it is not surprising that Frost employs it as one of the primary themes of his poetry. Frost describes conflicts between desire and duty as if the two must always be mutually exclusive; in order to support his family, a farmer must acknowledge his responsibilities rather than indulge in his personal desires. This conflict is particularly clear in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," when the narrator expresses his wish to stay in the woods and watch the snow continue to fall. However, he is unable to deny his obligation to his family and his community; he cannot remain in the woods because of his "promises to keep," as he says:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep

And miles to go before I sleep.

Similarly, in "The Sound of Tree," Frost describes a character who wants to follow the advice of the trees and make the "reckless" decision to leave his community. At the end of the poem, the character does not choose to leave (yet) because his sense of duty to those around him serves as the roots that keep him firmly grounded.

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

Rationality versus Imagination:

    This theme is similar to the theme of duty, in that the hardworking people whom Frost describes in his poetry are forced to choose between rationality and imagination; the two cannot exist simultaneously. The adults in Frost's poetry generally maintain their rationality as a burden of duty, but there are certain cases when the hint of imagination is almost too seductive to bear. For example, in "Birches," the narrator wishes that he could climb a birch tree as he did in his childhood and leave the rational world behind, if only for a moment. This ability to escape rationality and indulge in the liberation of imagination is limited to the years of childhood. After reaching adulthood, the traditions of New England life require strict rationality and an acceptance of responsibility. As a result of this conflict, Frost makes the poem "Out, Out--" even more tragic, describing a young boy who is forced to leave his childhood behind to work at a man's job and ultimately dies in the process.

Rural Life versus Urban Life:

This theme relates to Frost's interest in Nature and everyday life. Frost's experience growing up in New England exposed him to a particular way of life that seemed less complicated and yet more meaningful than the life of a city dweller. The farmers whom Frost describes in his poetry have a unique perspective on the world as well as a certain sense of honor and duty in terms of their work and their community. Frost is not averse to examining urban life in his poetry; in "Acquainted with the Night," the narrator is described as being someone who lives in a large city. However, Frost has more opportunities to find metaphysical meaning in everyday tasks and explore the relationship between mankind and nature through the glimpses of rural life and farming communities that he expresses in his poetry. Urban life is "real," but it lacks the quality and clarity of life that is so fascinating to Frost in his work.

Youth and the Loss of Innocence:

Youth appears prominently in Frost’s poetry, particularly in connection with innocence and its loss. A Boy’s Will deals with this theme explicitly, tracing the development of a solitary youth as he explores and questions the world around him. Frost’s later work depicts youth as an idealized, edenic state full of possibility and opportunity. But as his poetic tone became increasingly jaded and didactic, he imagines youth as a time of unchecked freedom that is taken for granted and then lost. The theme of lost innocence becomes particularly poignant for Frost after the horrors of World War I and World War II, in which he witnessed the physical and psychic wounding of entire generations of young people. Later poems, including “Birches” (1916), “Acquainted with the Night” (1928), and “Desert Places” (1936), explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting adult experiences with the carefree pleasures of youth. In Home Burial, the lady suffers from a terrible sense of self-alienation, as well as alienation from her surroundings. And more than the physical loneliness, man suffers from the loneliness within.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars--on stars where no human race is.

 I have it in me so much nearer home

 To scare myself with my own desert places.

                                                              (Desert places)

Human limitation:

Practically all of Frost’s poems depict the theme of human limitation. The universe seems chaotic and horrific because man’s limited faculties cannot comprehend its meaning. Walls, physical and real, mental and invisible separate man from nature. Neither Out Far Nor In Deep shows man’s limitation concerning the universe. Frost’s human beings are aware of the gap between the actual and the ideal. In “After Apple-Picking”, the apple-picker set out on his work with great hopes, but faces disillusionment.

For I have too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired

Frost is aware of the limited capacity of man for changing the world and therefore shows man’s partial control of nature, as in Birches or Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. In Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening the traveler is charmed by nature but his spirit impels him to get along to do his duty. Frost indicates that nature requires man’s awareness and shows the earning of a livelihood in several of his poems. In some poems, however, Frost does indicate that man can exceed his limitation in his thought as in “Sand Dunes”.

Extinction or death:

Theme of extinction or death runs through the major works of Frost. In many a poems, he writes of “sleep” which is associated with death. “Fire and Ice” is a noteworthy poem on destruction by excess of desire or hatred. “Stopping by Woods On a snowy evening” , “After Apple-Picking”, “An Old Man’s Winter Night” all these poems have a reference to death.

In most of Frost’s poems, the speaker undergoes a process of self-discovery. The wood-chopper of Two Tramps in Mud Time realizes by the end of the poem that he chops woods for love of work only but love and need should not be separated.

Theme of Affirmation:

Theme of affirmation is also found in some of his poems. Frost ultimately presents the needs for man to make the most of his situation. Aware of man’s limitations, he yet desires man to explore and seek knowledge and truth. Man should learn to accept things and his limitations cheerfully. He suggests stoical will and effort in face of adversity as in “West Running Brook”.

In the face of the mystery and the riddle of life there is necessity for determined human performance.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Theme of love is central to Frost’s poems. If there is any force that can help man meet the challenges of the universe, it is love. In several of Frost’s poems, the significance of love between man and woman, or friendly love is brought out. It is when love breaks down or fades off that life becomes unbearable especially for women in Frost’s poetry.

Frost does not deal with the type of themes which we come across in T.S.Eliot, but that does not mean that he is any the less modern. Lynen observes: “Subject matter is a poor measure of a poet’s modernity.” Frost’s attachment with New England and rural life generally cause a misinterpretation of his themes. Thus a number of critics think that Frost never wanted to be characterized by topical labels. He ignores many of the overwhelming subjects of the twentieth century, to be specific the two world wars and the problems of urbanization and mechanization. But a point worthy to be stressed here is that the work of his contemporary writers who are characterized by topical labels became lusterless and outdated as the year passed. Meanwhile Frost’s poems retain their freshness, as they are less reliant on contemporary idioms, events and people.