Robert Frost was an American poet who achieved both critical and popular success during his lifetime. He published his first collection of poems, A Boy's Will, in 1913 at age 39, though he had been writing poetry for decades prior. Over the following decades, Frost published numerous collections that earned him widespread acclaim and four Pulitzer Prizes. His poems, often set in rural New England, explored themes of nature, isolation, and community through precise language and form. Though he worked within traditional forms, Frost's innovative use of language and variation helped shape American poetry in the early 20th century.

1. Context
When an artist becomes so popular that hoi polloi celebrate
him and politicians reward him, critics and avant-gardes do
their best to dismiss him. But Frost was that rarest of rare
things: a poet who was very, very popular—superstar
popular—and, at his best, very, very good. His popularity is
unmatched in the annals of American poetry; by the end of his
life he had achieved the iconic status of living legend. His
collected poems exceeded record sales; he appeared on
magazine covers, was asked by President Kennedy to
compose an inaugural poem, was sent to Russia on a mission
of goodwill by the U.S. government, was recognized on the
street and in restaurants. He almost single-handedly created
the poetry reading circuit, delighting the public all over the
country with engaging presentations of his work. He was
perhaps the first poet-in-residence at an American university,
in which capacity his duty was little more than to live and
exude poetry.
Frost is a poet who often seems liked for the wrong reasons—
a poet who is read much but often not very carefully. The
subtle wit of his language, his broad humor, and his frequent
despair are too often overlooked for his regional-ness, his
folksiness, and his public persona. The neglect of his true

2. talents was compounded by the fact that serious criticism for
so long did its best to ignore him. However, regardless of who
reads him and for what reasons, what really matters are the
poems; they stand alone by virtue of their own strength,
independent of the associations surrounding them: Though
perhaps influenced by, or in agreement with, statements by
Imagists, Frost nonetheless belonged to no school; he worked
outside of movements and manifestos to create his own
sizeable niche in English literature. In the years covered by
this SparkNote we find Frost reaching toward, and finally
achieving, a mastery of his art.
Robert Frost is considered the quintessential New England
poet, but he spent the first eleven years of his life in San
Francisco. Only upon the death of Frost’s father did the family
go to live with relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There,
Frost excelled in high school and fell in love with his co-
valedictorian at Lawrence High, Elinor White. They became
engaged; Elinor went off to college at St. Lawrence in upstate
New York while Frost entered Dartmouth. He was not happy
there, however, and left after one semester. Back home, Frost
worked as a reporter on a local newspaper and taught school
(in part, to help his mother, a teacher with poor control over
her students). Frost and Elinor married in 1896, the same
year their son Elliott was born. In 1897, Frost matriculated at

3. Harvard University, where he excelled in the Classics.
However, the financial and emotional pressures of having a
wife, infant, and another child on the way, forced Frost to
withdraw after three semesters.
The Frosts moved to a rented farm near Methuen,
Massachusetts, and began raising poultry. Tragedy struck
in 1900 when three-year-old Elliott died. The family bought a
farm in Derry, not far from Lawrence, and Frost settled in to
farm, read, write, and raise a family. Three more children
were born healthy before the Frosts lost another child in
infancy in 1907. In 1906, Frost began teaching at the nearby
Pinkerton Academy, where he proved an unconventional and
popular instructor. In 1912, frustrated at his lack of success in
the American poetry world, Frost moved his family to England.
They remained there through 1915. In that time he met and
befriended many of his British contemporaries, both of major
and minor reputation, as well as the American ex-
patriot wunderkind Ezra Pound. In 1913, Frost found a
London publisher for his A Boy’s Will, and North of
Boston appeared in 1914. When the Frosts returned to New
England in 1915, both books appeared in the United States—
North of Boston to much acclaim. The move to England had
proved successful. Frost was suddenly well known in

4. American poetry circles. He would soon be well known
everywhere.
Mountain Interval appeared in 1916. Frost began teaching at
Amherst College in 1917, then served as Poet-in-Residence
at the University of Michigan. He would later return to
Amherst, then to Michigan, then again to Amherst. He also
taught at Harvard and Dartmouth but maintained the longest
associations with Amherst and the Bread Loaf Writer’s
Conference at Middlebury College. His Selected
Poems and New Hampshire were published in 1923. New
Hampshiregarnered Frost the first of his unmatched four
Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. West-Running Brook was published
in 1928, followed by Frost’s Collected Poems in 1930 (Pulitzer
#2), A Further Range in 1936(Pulitzer #3), A Witness
Tree in 1942 (Pulitzer #4), A Masque of
Reason in 1945, Steeple Bush and A Masque of
Mercy in 1947, another Complete Poems in 1949, and In the
Clearing in 1962.
Frost’s crowning public moment was his recitation of “The Gift
Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January
of 1960. He died on January 29, 1963.
Summary
To refer to a group of Frost’s poems as “early” is perhaps
problematic: One is tempted to think of the term as relative

5. given that Frost’s first book of poetry appeared when he was
already 39. Moreover, Frost’s pattern of withholding poems
from publication for long periods of time makes dating his
work difficult. Many of the poems of the first book, A Boy’s
Will, were, in fact, written long before—a few more than a
decade earlier. Likewise, Frost’s later books contain poems
almost certainly written in the period discussed in this note.
The “Early Poems” considered here are a selection of well
known verses published in the eleven years (1913-1923)
spanned by Frost’s first four books: A Boy’s Will, North of
Boston, Mountain Interval, and New Hampshire.
Frost famously likened the composition of free-verse poetry to
playing tennis without a net: it might be fun, but it “ain’t
tennis.” You will find only tennis in the poems that follow. And
yet, even while Frost worked within form, he also worked the
form itself, shaping it by his choice of language and his use of
variation. He invented forms, too, when the poem required it.
A theme in Frost’s work is the need for some, but not total,
freedom—for boundaries, too, can be liberating for the poet,
and Frost perhaps knew this better than anyone: No American
poet has wrought such memorable, personally identifiable,
idiosyncratic poetry from such self-imposed, often traditional
formulae.

6. In these “early” years, Frost was concerned with perfecting
what he termed “the sound of sense.” This was “the abstract
vitality of our speech...pure sound— pure form”: a rendering,
in words, of raw sensory perception. The words, the form of
the words, and the sounds they encode are as much the
subject of the poem as the subject is. Frost once wrote in a
letter that to be a poet, one must “learn to get cadences by
skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity
of accent across the regular beat of the metre.” Thus, we read
“Mowing” and simultaneously hear the swishing and
whispering of the scythe; upon reading “Stopping by the
Woods,” one clearly hears the sweep of easy wind and downy
flake; to read “Birches” is to vividly sense the breezy stir that
cracks and crazes the trees’ enamel.
Most of the lyrics treated in this note are relatively short, but
Frost also pioneered the long dramatic lyric (represented here
by “Home Burial”). These works depict spirited characters of a
common, localized stripe: New England farm families, hired
men, and backwoods curious characters. The shorter poems
are often, understandably, more vague in their
characterization, but their settings are no less vivid. Moreover,
they integrate form and content to stunning effect.

7. Frost’s prose output was slight;however, he did manage,
in essays such as “The Figure a Poem Makes,” to craft
several enduring aphorisms about poetry. In regard to the
figure of a poem, or that of a line itself, he wrote: “We
enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.”
A poem, he wrote, aims for “a momentary stay against
confusion.” It “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.”
“Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on
its own melting.” He claimed that the highest goal of the
poet—and it was a goal he certainly achieved—is “to
lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.”
Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
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

8. 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.
SELF-KNOWLEDGE THROUGH NATURE
Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems
usually include a moment of interaction or encounter between
a human speaker and a natural subject or phenomenon.
These encounters culminate in profound realizations or
revelations, which have significant consequences for the
speakers. Actively engaging with nature—whether through
manual labor or exploration—has a variety of results,
including self-knowledge, deeper understanding of the human
condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world.
Frost’s earlier work focuses on the act of discovery and
demonstrates how being engaged with nature leads to growth
and knowledge. For instance, a day of harvesting fruit leads to
a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death, in “After
Apple-Picking” (1915). Mid-career, however, Frost used
encounters in nature to comment on the human condition. In
his later works, experiencing nature provided access to the
universal, the supernatural, and the divine, even as the

9. poems themselves became increasingly focused on aging
and mortality.
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” (1936), for
example, wonders about the “design of darkness” (13) that
has led a spider to kill a moth over the course of a night.
While humans might learn about themselves through nature,
nature and its ways remain mysterious.
COMMUNITY VS. ISOLATION
Frost marveled at the contrast between the human capacity to
connect with one another and to experience feelings of
profound isolation. In several Frost 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

10. her or his connection to others or, conversely, the ways that
she or he feels isolated from the community. Earlier poems
feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in
order to learn more about themselves, but these speakers
ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around
them, as in “The Tufts of Flowers” (1915) and “Mending Wall”
(1915). Longer dramatic poems explore how people isolate
themselves even within social contexts. Later poems return
the 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, including “Acquainted with
the Night” and “Desert Places.”
Motifs
MANUAL LABOR
Labor functions as a tool for self-analysis and discovery in
Frost’s poetry. Work allows his speakers to understand
themselves and the world around them. Traditionally, pastoral
and romantic poets emphasized a passive relationship with
nature, wherein people would achieve understanding and
knowledge by observing and meditating, not by directly
interacting with the natural world. In contrast, Frost’s speakers
work, labor, and act—mending fences, as in “Mending Wall”;

11. harvesting fruit, as in “After Apple-Picking”; or cutting hay, as
in “Mowing” (1915). Even children work, although the hard
labor of the little boy in “Out, Out—” (1920) leads to his death.
The boy’s death implies that while work was necessary for
adults, children should be exempted from difficult labor until
they have attained the required maturity with which to handle
both the physical and the mental stress that goes along with
rural life. Frost implies that a connection with the earth and
with one’s self can only be achieved by actively communing
with the natural world through work.
NEW ENGLAND
Long considered the quintessential regional poet, Frost uses
New England as a recurring setting throughout his work.
Although he spent his early life in California, Frost moved to
the East Coast in his early teens and spent the majority of his
adult life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The region’s
landscape, history, culture, and attitudes fill his poetry, and he
emphasizes local color and natural elements of the forests,
orchards, fields, and small towns. His speakers wander
through dense woods and snowstorms, pick apples, and climb
mountains. North of Boston, the title of Frost’s second
collection of poetry, firmly established him as the chronicler of
small-town, rural life in New England. Frost found inspiration
in his day-to-day experiences, basing “Mending Wall,” for

12. instance, on a fence near his farm in Derry, New Hampshire,
and “The Oven Bird” (1920) on birds indigenous to the nearby
woods.
THE SOUND OF SENSE
Frost coined the phrase the sound of sense to emphasize
the poetic diction, or word choice, used throughout his work.
According to letters he wrote in 1913 and 1914, the sound of
sense should be positive, as well as proactive, and should
resemble everyday speech. To achieve the sound of sense,
Frost chose words for tone and sound, in addition to
considering each word’s meaning. Many poems replicate
content through rhyme, meter, and alliteration. For instance,
“Mowing” captures the back-and-forth sound of a scythe
swinging, while “Out, Out—” imitates the jerky, noisy roar of a
buzz saw. Believing that poetry should be recited, rather than
read, Frost not only paid attention to the sound of his poems
but also went on speaking tours throughout the United States,
where he would read, comment, and discuss his work.
Storytelling has a long history in the United States, particularly
in New England, and Frost wanted to tap into this history to
emphasize poetry as an oral art.
Symbols

13. TREES
Trees delineate borders in Frost’s poetry. They not only mark
boundaries on earth, such as that between a pasture and a
forest, but also boundaries between earth and heaven. In
some poems, such as “After Apple-Picking” and “Birches,”
trees are the link between earth, or humanity, and the sky, or
the divine. Trees function as boundary spaces, where
moments of connection or revelation become possible.
Humans can observe and think critically about humanity and
the divine under the shade of these trees or standing nearby,
inside the trees’ boundary space. Forests and edges of
forests function similarly as boundary spaces, as in “Into My
Own” (1915) or “Desert Places.” Finally, trees acts as
boundaries or borders between different areas or types of
experiences. When Frost’s speakers and subjects are near
the edge of a forest, wandering in a forest, or climbing a tree,
they exist in liminal spaces, halfway between the earth and
the sky, which allow the speakers to engage with nature and
experience moments of revelation.
BIRDS AND BIRDSONG
In Frost’s poetry, birds represent nature, and their songs
represent nature’s attitudes toward humanity. Birds provide a
voice for the natural world to communicate with humans. But

14. their songs communicate only nature’s indifference toward the
human world, as in “The Need of Being Versed in Country
Things” (1923) and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the
Same” (1942). Their beautiful melodies belie an absence of
feeling for humanity and our situations. Nevertheless, as a
part of nature, birds have a right to their song, even if it
annoys or distresses human listeners. In “A Minor Bird”
(1928), the speaker eventually realizes that all songs must
continue to exist, whether those songs are found in nature, as
with birds, or in culture, as with poems. Frost also uses birds
and birdsong to symbolize poetry, and birds become a
medium through which to comment on the efficacy of poetry
as a tool of emotional expression, as in “The Oven Bird”
(1920).
SOLITARY TRAVELERS
Solitary travelers appear frequently in Frost’s poems, and
their attitudes toward their journeys and their surroundings
highlight poetic and historical themes, including the figure of
the wanderer and the changing social landscape of New
England in the twentieth century. As in romanticism, a
literary movement active in England from
roughly 1750 to 1830, Frost’s poetry demonstrates great
respect for the social outcast, or wanderer, who exists on the
fringes of a community. Like the romanticized notion of the

15. solitary traveler, the poet was also separated from the
community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as
well as the natural world, with a sense of wonder, fear, and
admiration. Able to engage with his surroundings using fresh
eyes, the solitary traveler simultaneously exists as a part of
the landscape and as an observer of the landscape. Found in
“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), “Into My
Own,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Road Not Taken”
(1920), among other poems, the solitary traveler
demonstrates the historical and regional context of Frost’s
poetry. In the early twentieth century, the development of
transportation and industry created the social type of the
wandering “tramp,” who lived a transient lifestyle, looking for
work in a rapidly developing industrial society. Like Frost’s
speakers and subjects, these people lived on the outskirts of
the community, largely away from the warmth and complexity
of human interaction.
“Mending Wall”
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Complete Text

16. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

17. My apple trees will never get across 25
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45
Summary

18. A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his
neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly
make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be
kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine
trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The
neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good
neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and
mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-
fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be
swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover
from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-
age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.
Form
Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the
lines march along in blank verse’s characteristic lock-step
iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per
line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural
speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks,
obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the
end-words share an assonance
(e.g., wall, hill, balls, wall, and well sun, thing, stone, mean, lin
e, and again or game, them, and him twice). Internal rhymes,
too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The

19. vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only
one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—
and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately
with each other in sound and feel.
Commentary
I have a friend who, as a young girl, had to memorize this
poem as punishment for some now-forgotten misbehavior.
Forced memorization is never pleasant; still, this is a fine
poem for recital. “Mending Wall” is sonorous, homey, wry—
arch, even—yet serene; it is steeped in levels of meaning
implied by its well-wrought metaphoric suggestions. These
implications inspire numerous interpretations and make
definitive readings suspect. Here are but a few things to think
about as you reread the poem.
The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is arresting: two
men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a
barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit.
Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their
task Sisyphean. Sisyphus, you may recall, is the figure in
Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder
up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. These men
push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably,
whether at the hand of hunters or sprites, or the frost and

20. thaw of nature’s invisible hand, the boulders tumble down
again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to
meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-
building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the
doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this
activity regardless.
But, as we so often see when we look closely at Frost’s best
poems, what begins in folksy straightforwardness ends in
complex ambiguity. The speaker would have us believe that
there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on
building superfluous walls (with clichés as their justification)
and those who would dispense with this practice—wall-
builders and wall-breakers. But are these impulses so easily
separable? And what does the poem really say about the
necessity of boundaries?
The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building,
may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he
himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the
damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the
neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment.
Which person, then, is the real wall-builder? The speaker
says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that
there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are

21. cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must
derive something,some use, some satisfaction, out of the
exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here?
There is something in him that does love a wall, or at least the
act of making a wall.
This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in
ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and
the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists
and transports a boulder. Well, wall-building is ancient and
enduring—the building of the first walls, both literal and
figurative, marked the very foundation of society. Unless you
are an absolute anarchist and do not mind livestock munching
your lettuce, you probably recognize the need for literal
boundaries. Figuratively, rules and laws are walls; justice is
the process of wall-mending. The ritual of wall maintenance
highlights the dual and complementary nature of human
society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries,
proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of
other individuals’ rights. And it demonstrates another benefit
of community; for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers
a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor.
Wall-building is social, both in the sense of “societal” and
“sociable.” What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement
can, thus, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture.

22. Perhaps the speaker does believe that good fences make
good neighbors— for again, it is he who initiates the wall-
mending.
Of course, a little bit of mutual trust, communication, and
goodwill would seem to achieve the same purpose between
well-disposed neighbors—at least where there are no cows.
And the poem says it twice: “something there is that does not
love a wall.” There is some intent and value in wall-breaking,
and there is some powerful tendency toward this destruction.
Can it be simply that wall-breaking creates the conditions that
facilitate wall-building? Are the groundswells a call to
community- building—nature’s nudge toward concerted
action? Or are they benevolent forces urging the demolition of
traditional, small-minded boundaries? The poem does not
resolve this question, and the narrator, who speaks for the
groundswells but acts as a fence-builder, remains a
contradiction.
Many of Frost’s poems can be reasonably interpreted as
commenting on the creative process; “Mending Wall” is no
exception. On the basic level, we can find here a discussion
of the construction-disruption duality of creativity. Creation is a
positive act—a mending or a building. Even the most
destructive-seeming creativity results in a change, the building
of some new state of being: If you tear down an edifice, you

23. create a new view for the folks living in the house across the
way. Yet creation is also disruptive: If nothing else, it disrupts
the status quo. Stated another way, disruption is creative: It is
the impetus that leads directly, mysteriously (as with the
groundswells), to creation. Does the stone wall embody this
duality? In any case, there is something about “walking the
line”—and building it, mending it, balancing each stone with
equal parts skill and spell—that evokes the mysterious and
laborious act of making poetry.
On a level more specific to the author, the question of
boundaries and their worth is directly applicable to Frost’s
poetry. Barriers confine, but for some people they also
encourage freedom and productivity by offering challenging
frameworks within which to work. On principle, Frost did not
write free verse. His creative process involved engaging
poetic form (the rules, tradition, and boundaries—the walls—
of the poetic world) and making it distinctly his own. By
maintaining the tradition of formal poetry in unique ways, he
was simultaneously a mender and breaker of walls.
NEXT:
Home Burial
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24. Complete Text
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke 5
Advancing toward her: “What is it you see
From up there always?—for I want to know.”
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: “What is it you see?” 10
Mounting until she cowered under him.
“I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.”
She, in her place, refused him any help,
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see, 15
Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see.
But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again, “Oh.”
“What is it—what?” she said.
“Just that I see.”
‘You don’t,” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”
“The wonder is I didn’t see it at once. 20

25. I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? 25
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child’s mound——”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t,
don’t,” she cried. 30
She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm
That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs;
And turned on him with such a daunting look,
He said twice over before he knew himself:
“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?” 35
“Not you!—Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it!
I must get out of here. I must get air.—
I don’t know rightly whether any man can.”
“Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time.

26. Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.” 40
He sat and fixed his chin between his fists.
“There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.”
“You don’t know how to ask it.”
“Help me, then.”
Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.
“My words are nearly always an offense. 45
I don’t know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement 50
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.
Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.
Two that don’t love can’t live together without them.
But two that do can’t live together with them.” 55
She moved the latch a little. “Don’t—don’t go.
Don’t carry it to someone else this time.
Tell me about it if it’s something human.
Let me into your grief. I’m not so much
Unlike other folks as your standing there 60

27. Apart would make me out. Give me my chance.
I do think, though, you overdo it a little.
What was it brought you up to think it the thing
To take your mother-loss of a first child
So inconsolably—inthe face of love. 65
You’d think his memory might be satisfied——”
“There you go sneering now!”
“I’m not, I’m not!
You make me angry. I’ll come down to you.
God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,
A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.” 70
“You can’t because you don’t know how to speak.
If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand—howcould you?—his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap in air, 75
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting. 80
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice

28. Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave 85
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”
“I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.” 90
“I can repeat the very words you were saying:
‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot 95
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time when one is sick to death, 100
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretense of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned

29. And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand. 105
But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!
“There, you have said it all and you feel better.
You won’t go now. You’re crying. Close the door.
The heart’s gone out of it: why keep it up? 110
Amy! There’s someonecoming down the road!”
“You—oh, you think the talk is all. I must go—
Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you——”
“If—you—do!”She was opening the door wider.
“Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. 115
I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will—”
Summary
The poem presents a few moments of charged dialogue in a
strained relationship between a rural husband and wife who
have lost a child. The woman is distraught after catching sight
of the child’s grave through the window—and more so when
her husband doesn’t immediately recognize the cause of her
distress. She tries to leave the house; he importunes her to

30. stay, for once, and share her grief with him—to give him a
chance. He doesn’t understand what it is he does that offends
her or why she should grieve outwardly so long. She resents
him deeply for his composure, what she sees as his hard-
heartedness. She vents some of her anger and frustration,
and he receives it, but the distance between them remains.
She opens the door to leave, as he calls after her.
Form
This is a dramatic lyric—“dramatic” in that, like traditional
drama, it presents a continuous scene and employs primarily
dialogue rather than narrative or description. It is dramatic,
too, in its subject matter—“dramatic” in the sense of
“emotional” or “tense.” Form fits content well in this poem:
One can easily imagine two actors onstage portraying this
brief, charged scene. Rhythmically, Frost approaches pure
speech—and some lines, taken out of context, sound as
prosaic as anything. For example, line 62: “I do think, though,
you overdo it a little.” Generally, there are five stressed
syllables per line, although (as in line 62), they are not always
easy to scan with certainty. Stanza breaks occur where
quoted speech ends or begins.
Commentary

31. Pay special attention to the tone, vocabulary, and phrasing of
the dialogue. At the time of “Home Burial” ’s publication, it
represented a truly new poetic genre: an extended dramatic
exercise in the natural speech rhythms of a region’s people,
from the mouths of common, yet vivid, characters.
“Home Burial” is one of Frost’s most overtly sad poems. There
are at least two tragedies here: the death of a child, which
antecedes the poem, and the collapse of a marriage, which
the poem foreshadows. “Home Burial” is about grief and
grieving, but most of all it seems to be about the breakdown
and limits of communication.
The husband and the wife represent two very different ways
of grieving. The wife’s grief infuses every part of her and does
not wane with time. She has been compared to a female
character in Frost’s A Masque of Mercy, of whom another
character says, “She’s had some loss she can’t accept from
God.” The wife remarks that most people make only pretense
of following a loved one to the grave, when in truth their minds
are “making the best of their way back to life / And living
people, and things they understand.” She, however, will not
accept this kind of grief, will not turn from the grave back to
the world of living, for to do so is to accept the death. Instead
she declares that “the world’s evil.”

32. The husband, on the other hand, has accepted the death.
Time has passed, and he might be more likely now to say,
“That’s the way of the world,” than, “The world’s evil.” He did
grieve, but the outward indications of his grief were quite
different from those of his wife. He threw himself into the
horrible task of digging his child’s grave—into physical work.
This action further associates the father with a “way-of-the-
world” mentality, with the cycles that make up the farmer’s life,
and with an organic view of life and death. The father did not
leave the task of burial to someone else, instead, he
physically dug into the earth and planted his child’s body in
the soil.
NEXT:
One might say that any form of grief in which the bereaved
stubbornly finds the world “evil” is not a very healthy one. One
could also claim that the bereaved who never talks through
his grief—who never speaks of it—is doing himself and others
injury. But, again, the purpose of the poem isn’t really to
determine the right way to grieve. Rather, it intends to portray
a failure of empathy and communication. Each person fails to
appreciate the other’s grieving process—fails to credit it, allow
it, and have patience with it. And each fails to alter even

33. slightly his or her own form of grief in order to accommodate
the other.
Note how utterly the woman misunderstands the man’s
actions. To her, the act of burying the child was one of
supreme indifference, while to him it must have been one of
supreme suffering—an attempt to convince himself, through
physical labor, that this is the natural order of things; or an act
of self-punishment, a penance befitting the horror of the loss;
or simply a way of steeping himself in his grief, of forcing it
into the muscles of his arms and back, of feeling it in the dirt
on his clothes. Note, too, how the wife completely fails to
grasp the meaning of her husband’s words: “ ‘Three foggy
mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a
man can build.’ ” Indisposed to see her husbands form of
grieving as acceptable, she takes his words as literal,
inappropriate comments on fence building. Yet they have
everything to do with the little body in the darkened parlor. He
is talking about death, about the futility of human effort, about
fortune and misfortune, about the unfairness of fate and
nature.
And yet, the man is also partially to blame. If he had any
understanding of how to communicate to her, he would not
leave everything unspoken. He would make some concession

34. to her needs and articulate a brief defense. “You
misunderstand,” he might say. “When I said that, it was
because that was the only way I could say anything at all
about our loss.” Instead, he lets her accusations float in the
air, as if they were just hysteria and nonsense and not worth
challenging. This displays a lack of empathy and a failure of
communication as fatal as hers. When she describes his
heartless act of grave digging, he says only, “I shall laugh the
worst laugh I ever laughed. / I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe
I’m cursed.” This leaves her free to believe that he accepts
her accusation, that the curse refers to his hard-heartedness
and not the terrible irony of her misinterpretation. He uses
irony where she requires clarity. She needs him to admit to
agony, and he can grant her no more than veiled references
to a substratum of unspoken grief. And in the face of her
griefs obvious persistence, he makes a callous—or, at very
least, extremely counterproductive—remark: “I do think,
though, you overdo it a little.”
How important a role does gender play in this tragedy?
Certainly it has some relevance. There are the husband’s
futile, abortive physical threats, as if he could physically
coerce her into sharing her grief—but these are impulses of
desperation. And both husband and wife acknowledge that
there are separate spheres of being and understanding. “Cant

35. a man speak of his own child he’s lost?” asks the husband. “I
don’t know rightly whether any man can,” she replies. A little
later he laments, “A man must partly give up being a man /
With womenfolk.” He sees his taciturnity and his inability to
say the appropriate thing as a masculine trait, and she seems
to agree. (Yet she sees his quiet grave digging as nearly
inhuman.) Additionally, it is fairly standard to assume that
more outward emotion is permitted of women than of men—
the tragedy of this poem might then be seen as an
exacerbation of a pervasive inequality. Yet one enduring
stereotype of gender distinctions is the man’s inability to read
between the lines, his failure to apprehend the emotions
underlying the literal meaning of the woman’s words. In this
poem, husband and wife fail equally in this manner. A woman,
perhaps, might be less likely to dig a grave to vent her grief,
but she is just as likely to react to death by withdrawal or by
immersion in quotidian tasks. The reader witnesses the
breakdown of a marriage (the burial of a home, expressed in
the title’s double entendre), but more basically, this is a
breakdown of human communication.
Partly, that breakdown is due to the inescapable limits of any
communication. Much of the literature of the twentieth century
stems from an acknowledgement of these limits, from
attempts to grapple with them and, paradoxically, express

36. them. A great deal of Frost’s poetry deals with an essential
loneliness, which is linked to the limits of empathy and the
sense that some things are simply inexpressible. What can
one really say about the loss of one’s child? Can one
adequately convey one’s grief on such an occasion? Is
empathy—always a challenge—doomed to fail under such
particular strain?
We should note in passing—though it is not of merely passing
importance—that Frost knew firsthand the experience of
losing children. His firstborn son, Elliott, died of cholera at the
age of three. Later, his infant daughter died. Two more of his
children died fairly young, one by suicide.
“The Road Not Taken”
page 1 of 2
Complete Text
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

37. Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15
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. 20
Summary
The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the
road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with
un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself
that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is
unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he

38. admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene
with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled
road.
Form
“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines.
The rhyme scheme is ABAAB; the rhymes are strict and
masculine, with the notable exception of the last line (we do
not usually stress the -ence of difference). There are four
stressed syllables per line, varying on an iambic tetrameter
base.
Commentary
This has got to be among the best-known, most-often-
misunderstood poems on the planet. Several generations of
careless readers have turned it into a piece of Hallmark
happy-graduation-son, seize-the-future puffery. Cursed with a
perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase
wrought from simple words, and resonant metaphor, it seems
as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really
being read. For this it has died the cliché’s un-death of trivial
immortality.

39. But you yourself can resurrect it from zombie-hood by reading
it—not with imagination, even, but simply with accuracy. Of
the two roads the speaker says “the passing there / Had worn
them really about the same.” In fact, both roads “that morning
lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Meaning: Neither
of the roads is less traveled by. These are the facts; we
cannot justifiably ignore the reverberations they send through
the easy aphorisms of the last two stanzas.
One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma,
one that we instantly recognize because each of us
encounters it innumerable times, both literally and figuratively.
Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-
seated metaphors for the lifeline, its crises and decisions.
Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the nexus of free
will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know
beforehand what we are choosing between. Our route is,
thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it
is impossible to separate the two.
This poem does not advise. It does not say, “When you come
to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take the road
less traveled by” (or even, as Yogi Berra enigmatically
quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”).
Frost’s focus is more complicated. First, there is no less-
traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an option. Next, the

40. poem seems more concerned with the question of how the
concrete present (yellow woods, grassy roads covered in
fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.
The ironic tone is inescapable: “I shall be telling this with a
sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” The speaker
anticipates his own future insincerity—his need, later on in
life, to rearrange the facts and inject a dose of Lone Ranger
into the account. He knows that he will be inaccurate, at best,
or hypocritical, at worst, when he holds his life up as an
example. In fact, he predicts that his future self will betray this
moment of decision as if the betrayal were inevitable. This
realization is ironic and poignantly pathetic. But the “sigh” is
critical. The speaker will not, in his old age, merely gather the
youth about him and say, “Do what I did, kiddies. I stuck to my
guns, took the road less traveled by, and that has made all
the difference.” Rather, he may say this, but he will sigh first;
for he won’t believe it himself. Somewhere in the back of his
mind will remain the image of yellow woods and two equally
leafy paths.
Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation
of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The
Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is
forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods,
one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for

41. decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-
guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least
he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible,
unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such
that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the
other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not
so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision
themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the
passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.
Thus, to add a further level of irony, the theme of the poem
may, after all, be “seize the day.” But a more nuanced carpe
diem, if you please.
NEXT:
Birches”
page 1 of 2
Complete Text
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.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seen them 5

42. Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells 10
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed 15
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun. 20
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter of fact about the ice storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball, 25
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again

43. Until he took the stiffness out of them, 30
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise 35
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground. 40
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs 45
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May not fate willfully misunderstand me 50
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

44. I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk 55
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
Summary
When the speaker sees bent birch trees, he likes to think that
they are bent because boys have been “swinging” them. He
knows that they are, in fact, bent by ice storms. Yet he prefers
his vision of a boy climbing a tree carefully and then swinging
at the tree’s crest to the ground. He used to do this himself
and dreams of going back to those days. He likens birch
swinging to getting “away from the earth awhile” and then
coming back.
Form
This is blank verse, with numerous variations on the prevailing
iambic foot.
Commentary

45. The title is “Birches,” but the subject is birch “swinging.” And
the theme of poem seems to be, more generally and more
deeply, this motion of swinging. The force behind it comes
from contrary pulls—truth and imagination, earth and heaven,
concrete and spirit, control and abandon, flight and return. We
have the earth below, we have the world of the treetops and
above, and we have the motion between these two poles.
The whole upward thrust of the poem is toward imagination,
escape, and transcendence—and away from heavy Truth with
a capital T. The downward pull is back to earth. Likely
everyone understands the desire “to get away from the earth
awhile.” The attraction of climbing trees is likewise universal.
Who would not like to climb above the fray, to leave below the
difficulties or drudgery of the everyday, particularly when one
is “weary of considerations, / And life is too much like a
pathless wood.” One way to navigate a pathless wood is to
climb a tree. But this act of climbing is not necessarily so
pragmatically motivated: For the boy, it is a form of play; for
the man, it is a transcendent escape. In either case, climbing
birches seems synonymous with imagination and the
imaginative act, a push toward the ethereal, and even the
contemplation of death.

46. But the speaker does not leave it at that. He does not want his
wish half- fulfilled—does not want to be left, so to speak, out
on a limb. If climbing trees is a sort of push toward
transcendence, then complete transcendence means never to
come back down. But this speaker is not someone who puts
much stock in the promise of an afterlife. He rejects the self-
delusional extreme of imagination, and he reinforces his ties
to the earth. He says, “Earth’s the right place for love,”
however imperfect, though his “face burns” and “one eye is
weeping.” He must escape to keep his sanity; yet he must
return to keep going. He wants to push “[t]oward heaven” to
the limits of earthly possibility, but to go too far is to be lost.
The upward motion requires a complement, a swing in the
other direction to maintain a livable balance.
And that is why the birch tree is the perfect vehicle. As a tree,
it is rooted in the ground; in climbing it, one has not
completely severed ties to the earth. Moreover, as the final
leap back down takes skill, experience, and courage, it is not
a mere retreat but a new trajectory. Thus, one’s path up and
down the birch is one that is “good both going and coming
back.” The “Truth” of the ice storm does not interfere for long;
for the poet looks at bent trees and imagines another truth:
nothing less than a recipe for how to live well.

47. A poem as richly textured as “Birches” yields no shortage of
interpretations. The poem is whole and lovely at the literal
level, but it invites the reader to look below the surface and
build his or her own understanding. The important thing for
the interpreter is to attune her reading to the elements of the
poem that may suggest other meanings. One such crucial
element is the aforementioned swinging motion between
opposites. Notice the contrast between Truth and what the
speaker prefers to imagine happened to the birch trees. But
also note that Truth, as the speaker relates it, is highly
figurative and imaginative: Ice storms are described in terms
of the “inner dome of heaven,” and bent trees as girls drying
their hair in the sun. This sort of truth calls into question
whether the speaker believes there is, in fact, a capital-T
Truth.
The language of the poem—the vocabulary and rhythms—is
very conversational and, in parts, gently humorous: “But I was
going to say when Truth broke in / With all her matter of fact
about the ice storm.” But the folksiness does not come at the
cost of accuracy or power; the description of the post-ice
storm birch trees is vivid and evocative. Nor is this poem
isolated, with its demotic vocabulary, from the pillars of poetic
tradition. The “pathless wood” in line 44 enters into a dialogue
with the whole body of Frost’s work—a dialogue that goes

48. back to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno . And compare
line 13with these well-known lines from Shelley’s elegy for
Keats, “Adonais”: “Life, like a dome of many colour’d glass, /
Stains the white radiance of Eternity, / Until death tramples it
to fragments.” In “Birches,” the pieces of heaven shattered
and sprinkled on the ground present another comparison
between the imaginative and the concrete, a description of
Truth that undermines itself by invoking an overthrown, now
poetic scheme of celestial construction (heavenly spheres).
Shelley’s stanza continues: “Die, / If thou wouldst be with that
which thou dost seek.” Frost’s speaker wants to
climb towardheaven but then dip back down to earth—not to
reach what he seeks but to seek and then swing back into the
orbit of the world.
Frost also imbues the poem with distinct sexual imagery. The
idea of tree-climbing, on its own, has sexual overtones. The
following lines are more overt:
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.
As are these more sensual:

49. You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
The whole process of birch swinging iterates that of sex, and
at least one critic has noted that “Birches” is a poem about
erotic fantasy, about a lonely, isolated boy who yearns to
conquer these trees sexually. It is a testament to the richness
of the poem that it fully supports readings as divergent as
those mentioned here—and many more.
Two more items to consider: First, reread the poem and think
about the possible connections between getting “away from
the earth for awhile” (line 48) and death. Consider the
viewpoint of the speaker and where he seems to be at in his
life. Secondly, when the speaker proclaims, in line 52, “Earth’s
the right place for love,” this is the first mention of love in the
poem. Of what kind of love does he speak? There are many
kinds of love, just as there are many potential objects of love.
Try relating this love to the rest of the poem.
NEXT:
EXT: In what ways do the characters in “Home Burial”
misunderstand each other?

50. To the wife, the husband’s act of burying the child was one of
supreme indifference, while to him it must have been one of
supreme suffering—an attempt to convince himself, through
physical labor, that the death of a child is part of the natural
order of things; or an act of self-punishment, a penance to be
preformed befitting the horror of the loss; or simply a way of
steeping himself in his grief, of forcing it into the muscles of
his arms and back, of feeling it in the dirt on his clothes. The
wife completely fails to grasp the meaning of her husband’s
words: When he says, “ ‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy
day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,’ ” she takes
his words as literal, inappropriate comments on fence
building; she is indisposed to see her husband’s form of
grieving as acceptable. Yet his words have everything to do
with the little body in the darkened parlor. He is talking about
death, about the futility of man’s efforts, about fortune and
misfortune, about the unfairness of fate and nature. And yet,
how easy it would be for the man to explain himself to his wife
when she accuses him of heartlessness. If he had any
understanding of how to communicate to her, he would not
leave everything unspoken. He would make some concession
to her needs and articulate a brief defense. “You
misunderstand,” he might say. “When I said that, it was
because that was the only way I could say anything at all

51. about our loss.” Instead, he lets her accusations float in the
air, as if they were just hysteria and nonsense, and not worth
gainsaying. This displays a lack of empathy and a failure of
communication as fatal as the wife’s. When she describes his
heartless act of grave digging, he says only, “I shall laugh the
worst laugh I ever laughed. / I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe
I’m cursed.” This leaves her free to believe that he accepts
her accusation, that the curse refers to his hard-heartedness
and not the terribly irony of her misinterpretation. He uses
irony where she requires clarity. She needs him to admit to
agony, and he can grant her no more than veiled references
to a substratum of unspoken grief. And in the face of her
grief’s obvious persistence, he makes a callous—or, at the
very least, extremely counterproductive—remark: “I do think,
though, you overdo it a little.”
2.
Discuss the anticipation or remorse in “The Road Not Taken.”
There is a fair amount of irony to be found here, but this is
also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is
not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.”
Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if
he does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which
he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making),

52. the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself
somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder
at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other
Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no
Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. The
Road Less Traveled is a fiction the speaker will later invent,
an attempt to polarize his past and give himself, retroactively,
more agency than he really had. What are sighed for ages
and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the
moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop
the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal
strain of remorse.
3.
What is ironic about the speaker’s statements concerning his
neighbor’s opinion of wall-building in “Mending Wall”?
The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building,
may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he
himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the
damage done by hunters. And it is the speaker who contacts
the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual
appointment. Which person, then, is the true wall-builder? The
speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies
that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there

53. are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must
derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the
exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here?
There is something in him that does love a wall or at least the
act of making a wall. One source of irony lies in an
observation the poem makes indirectly: What seems an act of
anti-social self-confinement (wall-building) can, in fact, be
interpreted as an important social gesture. The ritual of wall
maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of
human society: The rights of the individual (property
boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the
affirmation of other individuals’ rights; it demonstrates another
benefit of community, for this communal act, this civic “game,”
offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his
neighbor. One senses that the two men don’t spend much
time together outside of this yearly chore. Wall-building can
be seen, ironically, as highly social—both in the sense of
“societal” and “sociable.” He are forced to ask ourselves
whether the speaker might not, in fact, believe his neighbor’s
proverb about good fences.
4. Discuss Robert Frost’s applications of “the sound of sense.”
5. In both “Stopping by Woods” and “The Road Not Taken,”
the speaker hesitates en route. Compare these hesitations.

54. Do they derive from the same impulse and misgiving or are
they distinct?
6. What is the effect of simple language in “Mending Wall”?