home burial
"Home Burial" is a long narrative poem told in Robert Frost's conversational, very free blank verse. This means that the general structure of the lines is unrhymed iambic pentameter -- the same meter that much of Shakespeare's work is written in -- which classically consists of five pairs of alternately stressed syllables, with the stress on the second syllable of each pair; a pure example would be the second line of this poem, "BeFORE/ she SAW/ him, SHE/ was STAR/ing DOWN". However, there are few lines in Frost's poem which are metrically this pure, for the simple reason that people really don't talk like that, and Frost is attempting to give the impression of speech within the constraints of poetry. The meter is important in this poem, because it gives "Home Burial" a formalism and at the same time a straining away from that formalism that is echoed in the poem itself. In this case the poem revolves around the formalism that surrounds our public display of grief, versus the ragged and anguished healing process that must be done from within. The unnamed couple in this poem have lost a baby to death. The mother grieves openly, and it could be said that she has never recovered from this
Frost, Robert. "Home Burial", from The Poetry of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, NY, 1969, p. 51-55. But another emotion wells up as well -- anger and bitterness at her husband, which is at first unexplained. Our first intimation of the rift between them shows up on line ten, when she "cowered beneath him", and immediately after that, in lines twelve to thirteen, she "refused him any help,/ with the least stiffening of her neck and silence." Their dialogue is cold and antagonistic: "What is it -- what?" "Just that I see." "You don't. Tell me what it is" (lines 18-19). But let's look specifically at what he did say, for in those lines lies the whole crux of the poem. After he dug his child's grave, he came inside and said, "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day/ Will rot the best birch fence a man can build" (lines 92-93). This remark was not offhand at all; it was closely related to his remark a few lines earlier in the poem, "I'm cursed. God, if I don't believe I'm cursed" (line 90). What the husband is saying is that he had planted a seed -- his child -- that seemed to be growing well; he had invested his very heart and soul and dreams in that child's future; he had "built" it well, but an act of God had inexplicably taken it away. The only way this close-mouthed farmer had of expressing such a truth was through the metaphor of farming, and his wife, whose metaphors were different, didn't understand. She assumed that if he could only talk about farming at such a time, he didn't care about his child, or her either. She was wrong. It would seem, on first glance, that the
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1078
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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