Selected

Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

ABOUT THE POET

• A four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry
• On July 22, 1961, Frost was named Poet laureate of Vermont.
• Influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert
Graves.
• Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish
his work.

NOTABLES
• Frost nonetheless belonged to no school; he worked outside of movements and manifestos to
create his own sizeable niche in English literature.
• 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. He believed that poetry
should be recited, rather than read
• 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
• 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.

THEMES
• Nature:
- Instead, he focuses on the dramatic struggles that occur within the natural world, such as the
conflict of the changing of seasons (as in "After Apple-Picking")
- Destructive side of nature (as in "Once by the Pacific").
- Frost’s earlier work focuses on the act of discovery

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

- Actively engaging with nature leads to self-knowledge, deeper understanding of the human
condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world.
- Demonstrates how being engaged with nature leads to growth and knowledge.
- Nature is not simply a background for poetry, but rather a central character in his works.
- 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.

• Every Day life:
- As a poet, Robert Frost was greatly influenced by the emotions and events of everyday life.
- Even the most basic act in a normal day can have numerous hidden meanings that need only to
be explored by a poetic mind.
- Frost discerned a deeper meaning, a metaphysical expression of a larger theme such as love,
hate, or conflict.
- 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
- 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 physical and psychic wounding of entire
generations of young people.
- Later poems, including “Birches” (1916) explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting
adult experiences with the carefree pleasures of youth.

• Communication:
- It appears as a significant theme is several of Frost's poems, as Frost presents it as the only
possible escape from isolation and despair.
- Unfortunately, Frost also makes it clear that communication is extremely difficult to achieve.

• Conflict:
- Frost describes conflicts between desire and duty as if the two must always be mutually
exclusive; in order to support his family, a farmer must acknowledge his responsibilities rather
than indulge in his personal desires.
- Hardworking people whom Frost describes in his poetry are forced to choose between
rationality and imagination; the two cannot exist simultaneously.

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

INTER TEXTUAL REFERENCE

• Communication: In "Home Burial," Frost describes two terrible events: the death of a child and the
destruction of a marriage. The death of the child is tragic, but inability of the husband and wife to
communicate with each other and express their grief about the loss is what ultimately destroys
the marriage

No, from the time when one is sick to death,

One is alone, and he dies more alone.
Friends make pretense of following to the grave

• For example, in "The Lockless Door," the narrator has remained in a "cage" of isolation for so
many years that he is too terrified to answer the door when he hears a knock.
• Rationality: In "Birches," the narrator wishes that he could climb a birch tree as he did in his
childhood and leave the rational world behind, if only for a moment. This ability to escape
rationality and indulge in the liberation of imagination is limited to the years of childhood. After
reaching adulthood, the traditions of New England life require strict rationality and an acceptance
of responsibility.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches

• Frost is of the tradition of Whitman, and independent of it”. The primary difference in the
traditions of the two poets is their essential view of the world. Whitman was a celebratory poet
who praised himself, America and all of life. In contrast, Frost believed that life was a tragedy and
adopted a philosophical standpoint in his poetry. His pessimistic outlook obviously conflicts with
Whitman’s optimistic attitude.

I CELEBRATE myself;
And what I assume you shall assume;
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.

• Hardy- I never cared for Life: Hardy, Yeats, and Frost are all masters of glorious negativity. These
poets find themselves in their alienation from the other
Life cared for me, And hence I owed it some fidelity...

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

• Henry David Thoreau:
I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately.
I wanted to live deep
and suck out all the marrow of life

CRITICAL COMMENTS
• In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman comments on Frost’s career
as the “American Bard”: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a
great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”
• Montgomery says, “What high seriousness to Wordsworth is fancy or humour in Frost”. Frost
never feels the same kind of brotherhood as felt by Wordsworth.

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

• On a dark winter evening, the narrator stops his sleigh to watch the snow falling in the woods.
• At first he worries that the owner of the property will be upset by his presence, but then he
remembers that the owner lives in town, and he is free to enjoy the beauty of the falling snow.
• Because the traveler stops the horse in an unusual place, where there is no house nearby, the
horse shakes its head, in the manner of asking if there is some mistake
• The lake is almost frozen.
• It is now very dark.
• It is quiet, and there is only the sound of the wind on the flakes of snow.
• The speaker continues to stand near the woods, attracted by the deep, dark silence of his
surroundings.

ANALYSIS:

• The poem was inspired by a particularly difficult winter in New Hampshire when Frost was
returning home after an unsuccessful trip at the market.
• 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 solitary traveler, the poet was also separated

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

from the community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as well as the natural world,
with a sense of wonder, fear, and admiration.
• Snow falls in downy flakes, like a blanket to lie under and be covered by. To rest too long while
snow falls could be to lose one’s way, to lose the path, to freeze and die.
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• The speaker ascribes society’s reproach to the horse, which may seem, at first, a bit odd.
• There is an overwhelming sense of the narrator’s unavoidable responsibilities.
• The repetition serves as a reminder, even a mantra, to the narrator, as if he would ultimately
decide to stay in the woods unless he forces himself to remember his responsibilities.
• The narrator’s “promises to keep” can also be seen as a reference to traditional American duties
for a farmer in New England. In a time and a place where hard work is valued above all things, the
act of watching snow fall in the woods may be viewed as a particularly trivial indulgence.
• The basic conflict in the poem, resolved in the last stanza, is between an attraction toward the
woods and the pull of responsibility outside of the woods.
• This conflict is particularly clear when the narrator expresses his wish to stay in the woods and
watch the snow continue to fall. However, he is unable to deny his obligation to his family and his
community; he cannot remain in the woods because of his "promises to keep," and so he continues
on his way.

THE MOST OF IT
• The poem begins with the man, a nameless individual in a mysterious, unidentified location.
• The loneliness of his physical location appears to support this view: he is surrounded by a lake, by
“tree-hidden” cliffs, by a “boulder-broken beach”.
• The man wants an “answer” or to start some sort of conversation with someone as he is lonely.
• The diction “mocking” further reinforces the idea that the man is unhappy with his isolation. The
man feels as if the universe is laughing at him because the only response he is hearing is the echo
of his own voice.
• The man hears a sound and suspects he might not be alone anymore.
• However, the man’s visitor did not turn out to be a fellow human.
• Not only does the new arrival prove to be an animal, but he seems to have little interest in the man
who has awaited his presence.

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

• He simply emerges from the water and stumbles off along the rocky beach, leaving the man alone
once more.
• The buck does not exit the scene quietly; the area seems even more quiet than it did before
because of the absence of the noisy buck.
• In the end, the man is still alone. The man must return to his original state of solitude

ANALYSIS

• He wants more out of life than it ordinarily provides.

• The diction “crumpled” contains a sense of onomatopoeia. It is a loud word. The buck has marched
onto the scene loudly, and yet it is not a human and cannot speak. The sound the buck brings with
it is not the kind of sound the man has been waiting to hear.
• Ultimately, though, the poem is to end in disappointment. The buck is unwilling and unable to
provide the man with the companionship he needs, and the whole event proves nothing but an
anticlimax: “- and that was all”.
• The hyphen forces a pause upon us, and the use of four monosyllabic words after the whirl of
activity that has preceded this line brings us, and the man, back down to earth with a bump.
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• This undefined individual represents a universal emotion: virtually every human being wants and
needs contact with others
• Everyone desires human contact.
• Everyone wants love or companionship.
• It is important to the man to have interactions with other human beings.
• This opening line evokes the speaker’s sense of isolation
• He is seeking companionship anywhere and everywhere.
• Perhaps it represents the idea that nature is unable to fulfill a supportive role in the lives of
humans, this brief encounter representing the most the man could have hoped for.
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• The contrast between the two characters in the poem is striking. The poem begins with inactivity:
the only action the man performs is to “cry out”, otherwise he spends his time thinking, waiting
and hoping. The buck, on the other hand, is associated with a range of dynamic verbs: “swim”,
“pushing”, “landed pouring like a waterfall”, “stumbled” and “forced” all give an idea of a great
flurry of activity once the buck appears.
• His physical strength is clear from these verbs and from the line “as a great buck it powerfully
appeared”, unlike the man whose power seems linked with mental rather than physical activity.

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

THE GIFT OUTRIGHT

• The colonists in America initially struggled to become one with the land because of their ties to
England.
• As years passed, however, they were able to build a commitment to the land and establish their
identities as Americans because of their efforts to build a land that was not based on the traditions
of Europe.
• In the metaphor of the poem, the land gave itself to its citizens while America was still a British
colony, so that its people did not “possess” it but merely inhabited it.
• While Americans “possessed” the land, they “still were unpossessed by” it. The weakness was
failure to act, to contribute, to shape the land.
• We were unpossessed because ownership of the land was denied us by England
• He next refers to Massachusetts and Virginia, setting his geographical location,
• “we were still colonials” he sets the time.

ANALYSIS

• “The Gift Outright” serves as history, narrative, metaphor, and political statement.
• Its subject matter—the origins and future of the United States of America—makes it a logical
choice for his presentation at President Kennedy’s inauguration.
• It serves as both a reminder of the past and a call to action for the future.
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• This poem is technically a sonnet, though unusual in this form because of its sixteen lines.
• It is written in iambic pentameter and free verse.
• From one perspective, this poem may seem to be nothing more than a triumphantly patriotic
work; Frost himself once compared it to “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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• Personifying the land this way results in making it an equal partner with the “we” and “our,” the
• The land becomes a woman, making us a corporate male that needs to make her ours
• The first-person narration attempts to pull the reader into the feeling of responsibility and duty.
• Frost chooses to ignore the conflict between the colonists and the Native Americans and instead
focuses on the clash between the Old World and the New World, the European world of tradition
and oppression and the new American world of freedom and destiny.
• The broad enthusiasm for America that characterizes the poem takes an unexpected turn in the
grave thirteenth line: “(The deed of gift was many deeds of war.)” Suddenly, the poem is not only

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

about a commitment to the land, but also a discussion of the Revolutionary War and remorse that
the battle over the land caused so many deaths.
• The use of parentheses in this particular line ensures that the specifics of the war are not
mentioned, but does insist that the memory of the war should not be forgotten or cast aside.
• Passionate surrender, for to give oneself “outright” means to do so immediately and totally
• We did not give ourselves to the land in the spiritual and physical union love demands.
• The key to the irony of the line is the curious phrase “The deed of gift,” which means considerably
more than merely “the act of giving.” That is, without expectation of return, a legal promise to give
or donate.

TREE AT MY WINDOW
• He closes his window at night, but out of love for the tree he does not draw the curtain.
• The poet has seen the tree shaking and trembling under the violent movement of the wind. This
symbolises the ordeal, worries and dilemma in the tree’s life.
• The tree must have seen the poet sleeping, in deep rest, but it was during those times, the poet
was in a state of disaster, dilemma and worry. When the tree saw the poet sleeping, in actually, he
was taken and swept. All was lost, but there was no raffle and outward display of the ordeal.
• At this point the analogy ends and the poet becomes aware of their differences i.e. between the
tree and himself which actually elevates to, between the world of Nature and that of man at large.
• The tree is only susceptible to the outward weather that of winds, storm etc. It is completely
indifferent to the aspects of emotions, intellect, and right-wrong. It can never relate to the
understanding of the inner weather, the aspects of human kingship, spirituality and the agony of
the soul.
• He sees the tree not as an instructor but as a comrade, a fellow sufferer.
• In this poem, Frost sympathetically blends the human and tree so as to fit like two hemispheres.
However, in the end he splits the idea explaining the inner and the outer weather.
• In some poems, such as “After Apple-Picking” and “Birches,” trees are the link between earth, or
humanity, and the sky, or the divine.
• 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.


Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

• The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood.
• The speaker arrives at a point where he must decide which of two equally appealing choices is the
better one.
• He examines one choice as best he can, but the future prevents him from seeing where it leads.
• He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing.
• Leaves cover both roads equally. No one on this morning has yet taken either road, for the leaves
lie undisturbed.
• The speaker remains committed to his decision to take the road he had previously selected, saying
that he will save the other road for another day.
• After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one
day in order to try the other road.
• However, he realizes that it is unlikely that he will ever have the opportunity to come back to this
specific point in time because his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and
other decisions).
• In years to come, the speaker says, he will be telling others about the choice he made. While doing
so, he will sigh either with relief that he made the right choice or with regret that he made the
wrong choice. Whether right or wrong, the choice will have had a significant impact on his life.

ANALYSIS

• 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.
• The 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 narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he
chosen the other path.
• This reading of the poem is extremely popular because every reader can empathize with the
narrator’s decision: having to choose between two paths without having any knowledge of where
each road will lead.
• Moreover, the narrator’s decision to choose the “less traveled” path demonstrates his courage.
• This selection suggests that he has an independent spirit and does not wish to follow the crowd.

Selected Poems of

ROBERT FROST
(Exam Notes by Arpita Karwa)

These are sample notes for B.A & M.A (English) Exams. You can take guidance & prepare your own notes in the similar manner.

PROVIDE, PROVIDE
• "Provide provide" reiterates the universal truth about beauty's ephemeral nature.
• “Provide Provide” paints a dreary picture of the ravaging powers of time and how time can take its
toll without any pity or concern whatsoever.
• The inevitability of ruin and decay is built into the very fabric of life.
• Even the most beautiful and ravishing things aren't spared. They too undergo the same fate.
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• Robert Frost wrote the poem “Provide, Provide” what he meant to say was decide, decide to
decide what type of life you wish to die. Throughout life you are given many choices.
• You can’t take control of your destiny but you may decide in what mental state you want to die.
• Meaning you can look at people before you, to take example if that’s the way you want to live
• You can be born a beautiful woman and still die a haggish old witch.
• You can rule the economy and be the richest person in the world yet end your life with fake
friends by your side or absolutely alone.
• One may find oneself exceedingly lonely and neglected in his old age.
• In such a dismal scenario, either one must die friendless and all alone or choose to purchase
friendship.
• No doubt, it isn't an ethical or praiseworthy way to go about making friends but then Frost knows
finding a true friend in today's materialistic world is near impossible. Taking a realistic view of
life, Frost recommends having phoney friends than having none.