2130_American Lit Module 2_ Robert Frost
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This document discusses several poems by Robert Frost including "The Gift Outright", "Home Burial", "After Apple-Picking", "'Out, Out—'", "Desert Places", "Design", "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", "The Road Not Taken", "The Oven Bird", and "Directive". It analyzes Frost's exploration of themes like mortality, the absence of God, and human powerlessness. It provides quotes and brief descriptions of these poems that reflect on these themes.
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2130_American Lit Module 2_ Robert Frost
- 1. Robert Frost
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Robert Frost
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Robert Frost
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The Gift Outright”
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “Home Burial” – “ ‘Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. / I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—’ ” • “After Apple-Picking” – “One can see what will trouble / This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.” • “‘Out, Out—’” – “They listened at his heart. / Little—less— nothing!—and that ended it.” Human Mortality
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “Desert Places” “And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less— A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express.” • “Design” “What but design of darkness to appall?— If design govern in a thing so small.” The Absence of God
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” “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.” Human Powerlessness
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • “The Road Not Taken” “I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” Human Powerlessness
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird, Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again. . . . . . . . . The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.” “The Oven Bird”
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry— Great monolithic knees the former town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered . . . . . . . . Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.” “Directive”
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “Birches”
- 12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “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. . . . . . . . . One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” “Birches”
- 13. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for Robert Frost
Editor's Notes
- Many of your students will already have encountered Robert Frost’s poetry in one form or another and will already have an idea of him as one of the most famous—and iconic—American poets of the twentieth century. Reintroducing Frost to your students will involve reinforcing this notion of his status as the definitive American poet of the mid-twentieth century (it’s not often that poets are featured on the cover of a major magazine like The Atlantic). A comparable late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century example of a poet with similar popular appeal would probably be Maya Angelou. (Indeed, when Angelou recited a poem at the inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, it was the first time a poet had done so since Frost spoke at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961.) But as you introduce or reintroduce Frost to your students you will also need to help them see that Frost was as engaged with the questions of literary modernism as were poets with significantly less popular appeal (such as Marianne Moore or Ezra Pound). Seeing beyond the folksy appeal of Frost’s poems about rural New England and into the complexities of Frost’s worldview (which is, at times, terrifyingly nihilistic) can prove to be a rewarding intellectual experience for students.
- President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie chatting with poet Robert Frost at a White House party for Nobel Prize winners, 1962. Frost read his poem “The Gift Outright” at the Kennedy inauguration in 1961. He was 86 years old at the time.
- This is Robert Frost’s handwritten manuscript of “The Gift Outright.” Read through “The Gift Outright” with your students and discuss how the poem attempts to capture a certain version of American history. What is the story of national history that the poem tells? Why do you think Frost chose this poem to read at a presidential inauguration? Frost biographers have noted that he intended to read a different poem but changed his mind at the last minute and recited “The Gift Outright” from memory. What is it about this poem that embodies a national narrative that simultaneously christens Kennedy as the nation’s president and Frost as the nation’s poet?
- After introducing your students to Frost’s prominence in the mid-twentieth century as an iconic American poet, review with them some of the recurring themes in his major poems before focusing on a close reading of individual poems. Human mortality is a theme that Frost returns to over and over again: how we confront it; how we accept it; how we avoid it; and how it gives meaning to our lives. In “Home Burial,” Frost gives us a dialogue between what appears to be a husband and a wife talking about their deceased child who, according to rural custom, was buried on the family’s home property. The final lines of the poem allude to the famous myth of Orpheus, who traveled to the underworld in a (failed) attempt to retrieve his beloved Eurydice from the realm of the dead. What is the effect of invoking this mythic story of a mortal’s attempt to triumph against the inevitability of death in a rural New England setting? What is Frost trying to accomplish? Is he trying to elevate rural New England to the stature of classical myth, or is he trying to illustrate a universal human desire to conquer death? “After Apple-Picking” takes a more indirect approach to the topic of mortality, and looking for these indirect references—the speaker’s constant reference to sleep, the “bruised or spiked” apples that (regardless of their quality) ultimately end up in “the cider-apple heap,” the woodchuck’s hibernation—makes for a good class discussion. How do thoughts of death haunt the speaker despite (or perhaps because of) the mundane nature of his tasks? “‘Out, Out—’” is the most direct of these three poems on the subject of death in that the poem tells the story of a tragic accident on a Vermont farm that results in a young man’s death. As the most direct of these three poems, is it also the least philosophical? Is it merely about an individual’s death, or is it a self-reflexive meditation on mortality in the same way that a poem like “After Apple-Picking” is? Discuss with your students the different ways that Frost treats mortality in these three different poems
- Some of Frost’s poems articulate the agnostic/atheistic attitude of twentieth-century intellectuals attempting to reconcile the horrors of world war and the innovations of contemporary science with traditional religious belief. “Desert Places” is a particularly stunning poem that takes Frost’s penchant for describing the natural world and uses those descriptions to articulate the sense of despair that accompanies one’s loss of faith. Discuss with your students the snow imagery in the first three stanzas of the poem: What types of emotions do these images conjure? What specific words and phrases does Frost use to make the snow an image of loneliness? After discussing these first three stanzas, talk about the final stanza, which directly addresses human fears about a world without God: What are the “empty spaces” to which Frost refers? What are the “desert places”? Is this a strictly nihilistic poem, or are there traces of hopefulness anywhere? “Design” is similar to “Desert Places” in that both poems involve description of the natural world (in this case, a spider) coupled with meditations on the possibility of divine or metaphysical influence in the material world. Discuss with your students the image of the spider in the first stanza of the poem: What does Frost’s word choice lead us to conclude about the spider he describes? What should our attitude be toward this spider? The second stanza consists almost entirely of questions about the spider—how it was created, why it appears the way it does, and what all of this suggests about the presence of some divine or metaphysical guidance in our lives. The unspoken questions that Frost appears to be asking are, “Does life happen by accident, or has it been designed this way? And if the latter, who or what designed it, and why?” How do you think Frost answers these questions?
- “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken” are two of Frost’s most famous poems, and many people read them for their quaint depictions of the New England countryside. A closer look at these poems, however, reveals that they depict human beings in settings that challenge their notions of power and free will. After reading “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” with your students, have them identify the descriptions in the poem that suggest a quiet, bucolic retreat in the woods. Then have them identify the descriptions that suggest some sense of unease in the poem, such as the fact that the speaker in the poem is trespassing (“Whose woods these are I think I know. / His house is in the village, though;”), that the speaker’s horse is distressed and uncomfortable (“He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake”), and that the speaker is out in the freezing cold on “[t]he darkest evening of the year.” What is the speaker of the poem up to? And what do we make of the repeated line at the end of the poem, “And miles to go before I sleep”? This isn’t a poem about a pleasant stroll through the woods; this is a poem about someone who feels out of place in the world and who is tied to obligations that haunt him. Propose to your students that this is a poem about human powerlessness and ask them to find evidence in the poem to support this claim.
- “The Road Not Taken” is another popular poem that many people read as a tale of courageous independence at taking the road less traveled. Read through the poem once with your students with this traditional reading in mind and discuss this as a poem about taking chances and following your own path. Then go back and reread some of the crucial details of the poem that contradict this initial reading. To begin with, the narrator notes in the second stanza that the two paths are “really about the same,” which contradicts the notion that this is a poem about rejecting the mainstream and following an alternate path. With this in mind, have your students reconsider the line “I shall be telling this with a sigh” as the narrator tells us which path he ultimately followed. Why is he sighing? What are his regrets? If both paths are the same, and he sighs as he takes a path that “made all the difference,” is this ultimately a poem about our lack of choices? What other evidence in the poem would support reading this poem as a monument to human powerlessness rather than as a triumphal assertion of individual choice?
- You can prepare for a discussion of “The Oven Bird” by reading “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” with its allusion to Eden and human mortality. “The Oven Bird” deserves an important place in our discussion, because Frost’s other poems, his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” many other works of literature by modern writers, and even the concept of modernism itself, seem contained and articulated in the poem’s last two lines: “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.” The bird and the poet ask questions that express the central modernist theme: How do we confront a world in which reality is subject to agreement or lacks referentiality altogether? How do we express the experience of fragmentation in personal and political life?
- Students at any level profit from line-by-line discussion of “Directive,” particularly in contrast with the earlier poem “After Apple-Picking.” In this poem, the speaker’s troubled sleep results from his realization of the imperfection of human power to “save” fallen apples (or fallen worlds) or to fully complete any task as someone with godlike power (or any “heroic” human being before the modernist era) might have been able to do. “Directive” transcends those limitations, offers a specific path to take (“if you’ll let a guide direct you / Who only has at heart your getting lost”) and arrives at a vision of spiritual regeneration unparalleled in any of Frost’s other poems: “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
- No study of Frost, at any class level, is complete without close analysis of the great poem “Birches.” Share with your students this image of birch and maple trees in autumn at White Mountain National Park, New Hampshire, and have them talk about their childhood experiences climbing trees or spending time in the wild. Try to help them recapture the sense of freedom, joy, and fun that comes with childhood in the woods before discussing Frost’s “Birches.”
- As you share “Birches” with your students, try to incorporate the insights from readings of other Frost poems into your discussion, particularly about the ways in which Frost uses the imagery of rural New England as an occasion to ruminate on metaphysics. What does it mean to be “a swinger of birches”? At one level, it’s a tribute to childhood. What else does it suggest? Think about the boy and the tree as separate characters in this poem. What happens to each of them on their own? What happens to them together? What’s the nature of their relationship? What do they learn from each other? What do they give each other? How is this a poem about the divine (look at the line “Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more” in particular)? Does “Birches” accept the possibility of the divine in ways that a poem like “Desert Places” does not? What evidence would you cite to support your answer?