Robert Frost's nature is quite opposite to the nature of Wordsworth.
Effect of Darwin is clearly seen in his poem. Nature is not life giving but its
destructive.
Fire and Ice
BY ROBERT FROST
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve
tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
This short poem outlines the familiar question about the
fate of the world, wondering if it is more likely to be destroyed by fire or
ice. People are on both sides of the debate, and Frost introduces the narrator
to provide his personal take on the question of the end of the world. The
narrator first concludes that the world must end in fire after considering his
personal experience with desire and passion, the emotions of fire. Yet, after considering
his experience with “ice,” or hatred, the narrator
acknowledges that ice would be equally destructive.
Interestingly, the two possibilities for the world’s destruction correspond
directly to a
common scientific debate during the time Frost wrote the
poem. Some scientists believed that the world would be incinerated from its fiery
core, while others were convinced that a coming ice age would destroy all
living things on the earth’s
surface. Instead of maintaining a strictly scientific perspective on this
debate, Frost introduces a more emotional side, associating passionate desire with
fire and hatred with ice. Within this metaphorical view of the two elements,
the “world” can be recognized as a metaphor for a relationship.
Too much fire and passion can quickly consume a relationship, while cold indifference
and hate can be equally destructive.
Mending Wall:- Robert Frost
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:
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,
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.
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.
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.
My apple trees will never get across
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
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,
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.
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.'
Mending Wall' opens with a speaker explaining that his
property is separated from his neighbor's by a stone wall that is constantly being
dismantled by 'something that doesn't love a wall.' Just what this something is
that disrupts the wall remains somewhat vague, but the speaker illustrates that
it cannot be animals or hunters. The task of mending the wall is difficult, and
because nothing in their respective properties poses a threat to the others,
the speaker tries to convince his neighbor that there is no need to continue to
fix the wall.
The neighbor, however, is unconvinced by the speaker's
reasoning and in response, simply utters his father's saying that 'good fences make
good neighbors.' The speaker again presses his neighbor, pointing out that
rational people should know exactly what they are keeping in and keeping out
when they build a wall, yet again the neighbor resists the speaker's reasoning.
The poem ultimately ends symbolically with the neighbor's repetition of the
adage that 'good fences make good neighbors.'
★
One of the central themes of this poem is the difficulty of
changing social conventions and traditions. The wall can be seen to symbolize an
activity that is unquestionably undertaken, and the neighbor's unsatisfying
response to the speaker's logic illustrates how stubborn people are to
challenge these activities. Moreover, not only does the neighbor have no convincing
reason for maintaining the wall, the wall actually separates the speaker from his
neighbor by keeping them on opposite sides of the wall. In this sense, the poem
isn't merely stating that outdated traditions are difficult to change, but that
these traditions can actually get in the way of humans coming.
“Mending Wall” is about two kinds of
barriers— physical
and emotional. More subtly, the poem explores an ironic underlying question: Is
the speaker’s attitude
toward those two kinds of walls any more enlightened than the neighbor’s?
Each character has a line summing up his philosophy about
walls that is repeated in the poem. The speaker proclaims, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
He wants to believe that there is a “something,” a conscious force or entity
in nature, that deliberately breaks down the stone wall on his property. He
also wants to believe that a similar “something” exists in human nature, and
he sees the spring season both as the source of the ground swells that unsettle
the stone wall and as the justification for “the
mischief in me” that he
hopes will enable him to unsettle his neighbor’s stolid, stone like personality. From the speaker’s perspective, however, when
the neighbor shies away from discussing whether they need the wall, the speaker
then sees him as a menacing “savage,” moving in moral “darkness,” who.mindlessly repeats the cliché “Good fences make good neighbors.”
The speaker does not seem to realize that he is just as
ominously territorial and walled in as his neighbor, if not more so. The
speaker scorns the neighbor for repeating his maxim about “good fences”
and for being unwilling to “go
behind” and
question it, yet the speaker also clings to a formulation that he repeats (“Something there is.that doesn’t love a wall”) and seems unwilling to think clearly about his
belief in it. For example, the speaker celebrates the way that spring ground
swells topple sections of the stone wall. Why, then, does he resent the
destruction that the hunters bring to it, and why does he bother to repair
those man-made gaps? Similarly, if the speaker truly believes that there is no
need for the wall, why is it he who contacts his neighbor and initiates the
joint rebuilding effort each spring? Finally, if the speaker is sincerely
committed to the “something” in human nature that “doesn’t love”
emotional barriers (and that, by implication, does love human connectedness),
why does he allow his imagination to intensify the menacing otherness of his
neighbor to the point of seeing him as “an
old-stone savage armed” who “moves in darkness”? To consider these questions,
the speaker would have to realize that there is something in him that does love
walls, but the walls within him seem to block understanding of his own
contradictory nature. Frost ends the poem with the neighbor’s line, “Good
fences make good neighbors.”
★★Design
Perhaps echoing the words of Hamlet, "Nothing
is either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,
Frost's superbly constructed sonnet, "Design,"
underscores the observation that perception
often determines reality for an individual as a
theme.
While at first the Italian sonnet of Frost, in its
light tone of near cajolery in its observation of
nature, suggests the poetry of the Romantics,
the poem moves to a Dark Romantic's
metaphysical wrestling worthy of Melville's Ahab
with its debate upon the goodness or evil of
white. Then, too, there is the overtone of the New
England Puritan in the consideration of a
universe "designed" with the moth, the spider,
and the flower all being white.
★
Home Burial
In this narrative poem, Frost describes a tense conversation between a rural husband and wife whose child has recently died. As the poem opens, the wife is standing at the top of a staircase looking at her child’s grave through the window. Her husband, at the bottom of the stairs, does not understand what she is looking at or why she has suddenly become so distressed. The wife resents her husband’s
obliviousness and attempts to leave the house. The husband begs her to stay and talk to him about her grief; he does not understand why she is angry with him for manifesting his grief in a different way. Inconsolable, the wife lashes out at him, convinced of his apathy toward their dead child. The husband mildly accepts her anger, but the rift between them remains. She leaves the house as he angrily threatens to drag her back by force.
The poem describes two tragedies: first, the death of a young child, and second, the death of a marriage. As such, the title “Home Burial,”
can be read as a tragic double entendre. Although the death of the child is the catalyst of the couple’s
problems, the larger conflict that destroys the marriage is the couple’s
inability to communicate with one another. Both characters feel grief at the loss of the child, but neither is able to understand the way that their partner chooses to express their sorrow.
