Robert Frost: Philosophy of his poems

As a poet, Robert Frost was greatly influenced by the emotions and events of everyday life. Within a seemingly banal event from a normal day—watching the ice weigh down the branches of a birch tree, mending the stones of a wall, mowing a field of hay—Frost discerned a deeper meaning, a metaphysical expression of a larger theme such as love, hate, or conflict.

Frost is perhaps most famous for being a pastoral poet in terms of the subject of everyday life. Many of his most famous poems (such as “Mending Wall” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”) are inspired by the natural world, particularly his time spent as a poultry farmer in New Hampshire. Ironically, until his adulthood in New England, Frost was primarily a “city boy” who spent nearly all of his time in an urban environment. It is possibly because of his late introduction to the rural side of New England that Frost became so intrigued by the natural world.

After the publication of his Collected Poems in 1930, Frost clarified his interest in the pastoral world as a subject for his poetry, writing: “Poetry is more often of the country than the city…Poetry is very, very rural – rustic. It might be taken as a symbol of man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion – written first for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use.” Yet Frost does not limit himself to expressing the pastoral only in terms of beauty and peace, as in a traditional sense. Instead, he also chooses to emphasize the harsh conflicts of the natural world: the clash between urban and rural lifestyles, the unfettered emotions and struggles inherent in rural life, even the sense of loss and simultaneous growth that accompanies the changing of the seasons.

Frost’s poetry is also significant because of the amount of autobiographical material that it contains. Frost was not a happy man; he suffered from serious bouts of depression and anxiety throughout his life and was never convinced that his poetry was truly worthwhile (as evidenced by his obsessive desire to receive a Nobel Prize). He suffered through the untimely deaths of his father, mother, and sister, as well as four of his six children and his beloved wife, all of which contributed to the melancholic mentality that appears in much of Frost’s work.

The raw emotion and sense of loss that pervades Frost’s poetry is particularly clear because of his straightforward verse style. Although he worked within some traditional poetic forms (usually iambic meter), he was also flexible and changed the requirements of the form if it conflicted with the expression of a particular line. Yet, even as he was willing to utilize the basic conventions of some poetic forms, Frost refused to sacrifice the clarity of his poetry. With that in mind, he was particularly interested in what he called “the sound of sense,” a poetic belief system in which the sound of the poetry (rhythm, rhyme, syllables) is as important to the overall work as the actual words. Therefore, in poems such as “Mowing” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost’s use of particular words and rhythmic structure creates an aural sense of the mood and subject of the piece even as the words outline the narrative.

Frost’s use of “the sound of sense” is most successful because of the general clarity and even colloquial nature of his poetry. At one point in his life, he asserted, “All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.” Although this quotation is perhaps a generalization of Frost’s poetic style, it does speak to the accessibility and simplicity that has made Frost’s poetry so appealing to so many readers for decades. Because of the clarity of the sounds in his work, both in terms of the narrative and in terms of “the sound of sense,” the readers are able to comprehend the basic emotion of a poem almost instantly and then explore the deeper, more metaphysical meanings behind each simple line.

During his beginnings as a poet, Frost was often criticized for using such a colloquial tone in his poetry. When his first poem was published in The Independent in 1894, the acceptance was accompanied by a copy of Lanier’s “Science of English Verse,” a not so subtle suggestion that Frost needed to work on mastering a more traditional tone and meter. Even after his success as a poetic was assured, Frost was still censured by some for writing seemingly simplistic poetry, works that were not reminiscent of high art.

Yet even though Frost’s poetry is simple and clear, Richard Wilbur points out that it is not written in the colloquial language of an uneducated farm boy, but rather in “a beautifully refined and charged colloquial language.” In other words, Frost’s ability to express such a depth of feeling in each of his poems through the medium of colloquial speech reveals a far greater grasp of the human language than many of his critics would admit. It is because of the clarity of his poetry that his poems are beloved and studied in high schools throughout the United States, and it is also because of this clarity that Frost is able to explore topics of emotion, struggle, and conflict that would be incomprehensible in any other form.

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Acquainted with the Night" (1928)

The narrator describes his loneliness as he walks the isolated city streets at night. He has walked beyond the city limits and along every city lane, but has never found anything to comfort him in his depression. Even when he makes contact with another person (such as the watchman), the narrator is unwilling to express his feelings because he knows that no one will understand him. At one point he hears a cry from a nearby street, but realizes that it is not meant for him; no one is waiting for him. He looks up at the moon in the sky and acknowledges that time has no meaning for him because his isolation is unending.

Analysis

This poem is written in strict iambic pentameter, with the fourteen lines of a traditional sonnet. In terms of rhyme scheme, Frost uses the “terza rima” ("third rhyme") pattern of ABA CDC DAD AA, which is exceptionally difficult to write in English.

This poem is commonly understood to be a description of the narrator’s experiences with depression. The most crucial element of his depression is his complete isolation. Frost emphasizes this by using the first-person term “I” at the beginning of seven of the lines. Even though the watchman has a physical presence in the poem, he does not play a mental or emotional role: the narrator, the sole “I,” remains solitary. Similarly, when the narrator hears the “interrupted cry” from another street, he clarifies that the cry is not meant for him, because there is no one waiting for him at home.

The narrator’s inability to make eye contact with the people that he meets suggests that his depression has made him incapable of interacting in normal society. While normal people are associated with the day (happiness, sunlight, optimism), the narrator is solely acquainted with the night, and thus can find nothing in common with those around him. The narrator is even unable to use the same sense of time as the other people in the city: instead of using a clock that provides a definitive time for every moment, the narrator relies solely on “one luminary clock” in the sky.

Ironically, since night is the only time that he emerges from his solitude, the narrator has even less opportunity to meet someone who can pull him from his depression. His acquaintance with the night constructs a cycle of depression that he cannot escape.

Frost adds to the uncertainty inherent in the poem by incorporating the present perfect tense, which is used to describe something from the recent past, as well as something from the past that is still ongoing in the present. It seems as if the narrator’s depression could be from the recent past because of the phrase: “I have been…” However, the verb tense also suggests that his depression could still be a constant, if unseen, force. With that in mind, it is unclear whether the narrator will truly be able to come back to society or if his depression will resurface and force him to be, once again, acquainted with the night.

Birch:

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

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.

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.

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 44enters into a dialogue with the whole body of Frost’s work—a dialogue that goes back to the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno . And compare line 13 with 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 toward heaven 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:

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.

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of "Birches" (1916)

When the narrator looks at the birch trees in the forest, he imagines that the arching bends in their branches are the result of a boy “swinging” on them. He realizes that the bends are actually caused by ice storms - the weight of the ice on the branches forces them to bend toward the ground - but he prefers his idea of the boy swinging on the branches, climbing up the tree trunks and swinging from side to side, from earth up to heaven. The narrator remembers when he used to swing on birches and wishes that he could return to those carefree days.

Analysis

This poem is written in blank verse with a particular emphasis on the “sound of sense.” For example, when Frost describes the cracking of the ice on the branches, his selections of syllables create a visceral sense of the action taking place: “Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells / Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust — / Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away…”

Originally, this poem was called “Swinging Birches,” a title that perhaps provides a more accurate depiction of the subject. In writing this poem, Frost was inspired by his childhood experience with swinging on birches, which was a popular game for children in rural areas of New England during the time. Frost’s own children were avid “birch swingers,” as demonstrated by a selection from his daughter Lesley’s journal: “On the way home, i climbed up a hi birch and came down with it and i stopt in the air about three feet and pap cout me.”

In the poem, the act of swinging on birches is presented as a way to escape the hard rationality or “Truth” of the adult world, if only for a moment. As the boy climbs up the tree, he is climbing toward “heaven” and a place where his imagination can be free. The narrator explains that climbing a birch is an opportunity to “get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.” A swinger is still grounded in the earth through the roots of the tree as he climbs, but he is able to reach beyond his normal life on the earth and reach for a higher plane of existence.

Frost highlights the narrator’s regret that he can ow longer find this peace of mind from swinging on birches. Because he is an adult, he is unable to leave his responsibilities behind and climb toward heaven until he can start fresh on the earth. In fact, the narrator is not even able to enjoy the imagined view of a boy swinging in the birches. In the fourth line of the poem, he is forced to acknowledge the “Truth” of the birches: the bends are caused by winter storms, not by a boy swinging on them.

Significantly, the narrator’s desire to escape from the rational world is inconclusive. He wants to escape as a boy climbing toward heaven, but he also wants to return to the earth: both “going and coming back.” The freedom of imagination is appealing and wondrous, but the narrator still cannot avoid returning to “Truth” and his responsibilities on the ground; the escape is only a temporary one.

Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of "After Apple-Picking" (1914)

At the end of a long day of apple picking, the narrator is tired and thinks about his day. He has felt sleepy and even trance-like since the early morning, when he looked at the apple trees through a thin sheet of ice that he lifted from the drinking trough. He feels himself beginning to dream but cannot escape the thought of his apples even in sleep: he sees visions of apples growing from blossoms, falling off trees, and piling up in the cellar. As he gives himself over to sleep, he wonders if it is the normal sleep of a tired man or the deep winter sleep of death.

Analysis

In terms of form, this poem is bizarre because it weaves in and out of traditional structure. Approximately twenty-five of the forty-two lines are written in standard iambic pentameter, and there are twenty end-rhymes throughout the poem. This wandering structure allows Frost to emphasize the sense of moving between a waking and dream-like state, just as the narrator does. The repetition of the term “sleep,” even after its paired rhyme (“heap”) has long been forgotten, also highlights the narrator’s gradual descent into dreaming.

In some respects, this poem is simply about apple picking. After a hard day of work, the apple farmer completely fatigued but is still unable to escape the mental act of picking apples: he still sees the apples in front of him, still feels the ache in his foot as if he is standing on a ladder, still bemoans the fate of the flawless apples that fall to the ground and must be consigned to the cider press.

Yet, as in all of Frost’s poems, the narrator’s everyday act of picking apples also speaks to a more metaphorical discussion of seasonal changes and death. Although the narrator does not say when the poem takes place, it is clear that winter is nearly upon him: the grass is “hoary,” the surface of the water in the trough is frozen enough to be used as a pane of glass, and there is an overall sense of the “essence” of winter. Death is coming, but the narrator does not know if the death will be renewed by spring in a few months or if everything will stay buried under mindless snow for all eternity.

Because of the varying rhymes and tenses of the poem, it is not clear when the narrator is dreaming or awake. One possibility is that the entirety of the poem takes place within a dream. The narrator is already asleep and is automatically reliving the day’s harvest as he dreams. This explanation clarifies the disjointed narrative — shifting from topic to topic as the narrator dreams — as well as the narrator’s assertion that he was “well upon my way to sleep” before the sheet of ice fell from his hands.

Another explanation is that the narrator is dying, and his rambling musings on apple picking are the fevered hallucinations of a man about to leave the world of the living. With that in mind, the narrator’s declaration that he is “done with apple-picking now” has more finality, almost as if his vision of the apple harvest is a farewell. Even so, he can be satisfied in his work because, with the exception of a few apples on the tree, he fulfilled all of his obligations to the season and to himself. Significantly, even as he falls into a complete sleep, the narrator is unable to discern if he is dying or merely sleeping; the two are merged completely in the essence of the oncoming winter, and Frost refuses to tell the reader what actually happens.