Viewing Robert Frost: Part One


© Audrey McCrone
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Feb 1, 2001


Robert Frost, America’s ‘Most Beloved’ poet, describes poetry as “an act of clarification.” This is the same definition we’ll find in a dictionary for art, therefore Frost took semantics very seriously. His descriptive realism throughout his works do draw the reader’s mind’s eye, propelling his images into imagination. There are several examples of such imagery, including but not limited to: the horse in "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Wood Pile," and "Mending Wall." We gather more than feelings through his poems, causing one to pause and think, considering each scene.

His style is predominantly classical. Frost loved sonnets and structure, so that his poems physically look like poems on the page, especially when compared with Walt Whitman’s flowing lines. This is kind of surprising, considering Frost had no formal literary background, but the man must have had high informational needs and read often, memorizing quite a bit of English poetry (such as Shakespeare, Shelly, and Keats particularly). He wrote about the ultimate realities of life.

For example, there are two voices present in “Mending Wall”: the young man, who sees “something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That wants it down”; and the aged voice, saying “Good fences make good neighbors.” The truth here is that boundaries do exist, often met by disagreement between younger and older generations. Generation gaps and misunderstanding, shown in such simple daily toil: mending the gaps in a wall between neighbors, keeping each other’s worlds from becoming less than controlled; chaotic and natural.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” follows a typical Frost rhyme scheme, which is as follows:

AABA/BBCB/CCDC/DDDD

His subtle repetition at the end suggests the rest will be for more than just one night, the white of the snow reflecting oblivion; icy death. We can see how he’s not really a naturalist, but a realist.

Although Robert Frost is not a philosopher, he is a thoughtful writer. I understand “Birches” was badly misunderstood in his time, since his famous daughter made known, publicly, that she would not let her father see his grandchildren. Apparently, Frost had a dark side he never showed in public, and it may have hurt him in his time. Frost would like to be optimistic and think it was the play of children that wore the branches of a Birch tree, but he faced natural reality instead, almost Atheistically. I can almost see a sinister side of him in “Birches,” which left me with the sense that he might pick a switch from it, with which to beat his kids. In addition, there was something of hate in Frost in the poem “Fire and Ice” (which both destroy).

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