Viewing Robert Frost: Part One
We read a mildly cynical Frost in “Departmental,” written in couplets of almost perfect rhyme. It could be considered not about ants but humans: specifically, the bureaucracy of organizational jobs in our world. Frost’s wry humor gives us the sense that things are always ‘someone else’s job.’ Frost’s emotions, both good and bad, flow through his semantics. One could consider Frost a rebel of sorts, admitting he had “a lover’s quarrel with the world.” His aged voice seems world-weary, but not ready to leave it for love. A true romantic heart by that respect, “The Silken Tent” seems to flow as his love for a woman, sturdy yet moving with the breezes, just as gently. He understood the significance of love in this world, as it gives us reason to hope, showing a tender side to Frost as well.
“The Silken Tent” is an extended comparison, whereas “She is as...” a tent: a beautiful guise of summer, with the silken ties of love held back to show her core. Does Frost describe a maypole or the sturdy, steady, love he feels, or (for that matter) is this a phallic symbol? The reader gains a sense of responsibility and obligation and higher cause (her central pole of cedar points heavenward). This is truly a poem of love and thought, in iambic pentameter, and (typically) a Frost sonnet.
Works Cited
Robert Frost’s Poems
(New Enlarged Anthology, with an introduction by Louis Untermeyer), © 1971 by Louis Untermeyer and Mary Silva Cosgrave, published by Pocket Books, “a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.”, NY, NY.
Dr. Harvey Kassebaum’s American Literature Class
(1999-2000). I kept my notes and referred to them, and I hope you don’t mind.
Voices and Visions
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