Abstract

Frost is that rare twentieth century poet who achieved both enormous popularity and critical acclaim. In an introductory essay to his collected poems, Frost insists that a poem “will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went,” an observation that applies to most of his three hundred-odd poems. Once his work came into circulation, its freshness and deceptive simplicity captivated audiences that shied away from more difficult poets such as T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, while astute critics are came to recognize the subtlety of thought and feeling that so often pervade these “simple” poems. In this paper, we try to focus on the Robert Frost and his work. We analyze collective group of their work finding common themes in the writings and things that stand out.

Robert Frost

Introduction

A number of Frost's poems celebrate encounters with nature. The first poem in his first book, “Into My Own,” and the last poem in his final book, an untitled one beginning “In winter in the woods alone,” depict a solitary person entering the woods, while in the long stretch between those poems the one that may be his best known of all, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” portrays the desire to do so. On another level, the woodsman — independent, defiant of urban artificiality, at one with nature — is one of Frost's conceptions of himself. The poems convey a number of themes and even more attitudes.

Discussion

Frost is also a daylight observer of ordinary people and their ways. The relationships of husbands and wives interested him particularly, and his range is wide, from the telepathic harmony of a couple in “The Telephone” to the marital disintegration of “Home Burial.” Perhaps no other poet has portrayed the give-and-take of marriage so variously and so vividly. His world is also one of neighbors, passing tramps, and even garrulous witches.

“The Oven Bird” First published: 1916 (collected in Mountain Interval, 1916)

Type of work: Poem

“The Oven Bird” is an irregular sonnet that explores in various ways the problem of “what to make of a diminished thing.” The poet does not refer to the bird directly by its other common name of “teacher bird” (based on the resemblance of its reiterated call to the word “teacher”) but attributes to the bird an instructive discourse about diminishment, the downward thrust of things. In the middle of summer, this bird reminds one of the fall (specifically the petal fall) that is already past and of the fall to come.

Like many of Frost's poems, this one is built on paradox. This bird can be said to sing, but it is not particularly tuneful. Its repeated call in a trochaic, or falling, rhythm does not have the upward lilt that humans generally consider cheerful or merry. The bird is a twentieth century teacher — not the old-fashioned lecturer but the modern one who contrives to induce the students ...