ROBERT LEE FROST NATURE IN POETRY

AND HIS

THEME OF

Robert Frost was the most popular American poet of the twentieth century. Most Americans recognize his name, the titles of and lines from his best-known poems, and even his face and the sound of his voice. Given his immense popularity, it is a remarkable testimony to the range and depth of his achievement that he is also considered by critics to be one of the greatest, if not the very greatest, modern American poet.

Early Years
Despite his indelible association with New England, Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco, California, on March 26, 1874, where his father was involved in journalism and politics. His parents were Isabelle Moodie Frost, a Scottish immigrant, and William Prescott Frost, Jr., the rebellious sonnote the poet's full nameof a New England Republican family. The two had met and courted while teaching school in Pennsylvania, but their dissimilar temperaments strained their marriage. An alcoholic, William Frost died of tuberculosis in 1885. Before his death, William Frost expressed a desire to be buried in New England, so Isabelle traveled across the country with young Robert and his sister Jeanie, and settled in her husband's native city of Lawrence, Massachusetts.

A young Robert Lee Frost

Mrs. Frost supported her family by teaching school in Salem, New Hampshire, just across the state line; among her pupils were her own two children. Robert attended high school in Lawrence, where his first poems were published in the school Bulletin. In 1892 he was co-valedictorian of his graduating class with Elinor White, to whom he became engaged later in that year. In September of 1892 he entered Dartmouth College, but withdrew in December, before the end of his first semester. Two years later he enrolled in Harvard, but left before the completion of his second year. He never finished college, though over the course of his life he would be the recipient of many honorary degrees from the most prestigious universities in the United States and Britain.

Between 19101920

Frost worked at a variety of jobs in his late teens and early twenties, including mill hand, newspaper reporter, and teacher in his mother's school. In 1894, a poem of his entitled "My Butterfly" was published in a New York journal, The Independent. This seemed to be the start of a successful career as a poet, but he would in fact endure nearly twenty years of isolation and neglect. He married Elinor on December 19, 1895, and Elliott, their first

Elinor Miriam White

child, was born on September 29, 1896. Elliott's death, from cholera, in July of 1900, was the first of many family tragedies that Frost would endure.

Between 1899 and 1907, Elinor and Robert had five more childrenanother son, Carol, and four daughters, the last of whom lived for only three days. Frost's mother also died in 1900, of cancer. The following year saw the death of his grandfather, William Prescott Frost, Sr., who left his grandson a yearly annuity of $500.00 (a substantial amount at the time) and the use of his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, for a period of ten years, after which Robert would become its owner. Frost's children

Frost raking hay, Derry Farm 1908

Literary Career
Despite his popular image as a farmer-poet, those ten years were the only period of Frost's life in which he worked seriously at farming, and in the last five of them he also found it financially necessary to teach school. He sold the farm in 1911 when it became his, and with the proceeds he moved his family to England in August 1912, hoping to find there the literary success that had eluded him in his own country. In England he made a number of friends and for the first time found himself an accepted member of a group of serious poets. With surprising ease, he had two manuscripts accepted by a London publisher, and was able to return to America early in 1915 as the author of two highly regarded books of verse.

A Boy's Will

The first of these, A Boy's Will (1913), a slender selection from nearly two decades of work, is very much a young man's book. Although several poems give hints of what was to come, its subjects and phrasing are for the most part heavily reminiscent of the Romantic poets, especially Keats and Shelley, who had most influenced the young Frost. It was with North of Boston (1914), a much more substantial book in both bulk and accomplishment, and one which many still consider his finest single collection, that Frost cameto use the title of the first poem in his first book"Into My Own."

There are good and even great poems in each of Frost's nine separate collections, but it is in North of Boston, and in Mountain Interval (1916) and New Hampshire (1923), its two immediate successors, that the essence of his achievement is to be found, in the two modes that he made his ownsubtle, concentrated lyric poems of understated but brilliant technical accomplishment, and longer monologues and narratives, usually written in a flexible and highly colloquial blank verse, often dramatizing the hard life of rural New England in the early part of this century.

Mountain Interval

These poems are the work of a mature man, and in both language and themes they stand apart from A Boy's Will, as well as from the popular image of the poet as an intense youth pouring out his or her deepest emotions in a rhapsodic cascade of words. The speaker in Frost's poems is usually careful and often sly, meditating on and distilling the essence of many years of observation and experience. While there are many passages of brilliant description and stunning beauty in his poetry, his rhetoric is measured and precise as he strives, like Wordsworth a century earlier, to catch the rhythms of the language as it is actually used, to catch, in his own phrase, "the sound of sense." On the surface Frost seems a very traditional poet. He felt that the demands and challenges of strict form were necessary to stimulate one's best efforts and to give the poem its necessary dynamic tension (he famously compared writing free verse to playing tennis with the net down), but in his spare and understated way he helped effect a revolution against the overwrought poetic standards of the time; the understatement was itself the very essence of that revolution. Upon his return to America, Frost's outward life began to take the shape that it would follow thereafter: publication of new and collected volumes at fairly regular intervals; teaching appointments, often sinecures, at Amherst, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Michigan, with his income supplemented by a heavy schedule of lectures and poetry readings all over the country; accumulating fame and honours, including an unprecedented four Pulitzer Prizes.

Last Years and Legacy

The capstone of his public career was his appearance at John F. Kennedy's Presidential inauguration in January 1961. Kennedy also sent him to the Soviet Union as a sort of cultural envoy in 1962, not long before Frost's death in a Boston hospital on January 29, 1963, eight weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday.

Frost receiving the Congressional medal of honour from President Kennedy, 1962

Behind the largely unruffled public facade was a personal life of great stress and sorrow. His daughters Lesley and Irma underwent unhappy marriages and painful divorces; Irma was at one point committed to a mental hospital, as Frost's sister had been some years earlier. His daughter Marjorie, in many ways the favourite of both her parents, died shortly after the birth of her first child in 1934, a loss from which neither Frost nor his wife ever fully recovered. In March 1938, after a long and often difficult marriage, Elinor herself died of heart disease. In October 1940, Frost's son Carol, feeling himself a failure despite Frost's strenuous efforts to convince him otherwise, committed suicide. None of these traumatic experiences found their way directly into Frost's poetry. At a far remove from the confessional tendencies of many later American poets, he did not see his art as a form of therapy. But these experiences, and the sense of helplessness and self-recrimination that many of them bred, inevitably worked to shape and colour the views of life's possibilities and its limits that inform his work. To the broad public, Frost may be a painter of charming postcard scenes and a front-porch philosopher dispensing consolation and cracker-barrel wisdom, but behind these stereotypes there is in Frost's work a tragic and (in Lionel Trilling's phrase) a terrifying poet, whose deepest note is one of inevitable human isolation. Frost was an expert manipulator of his own public image, and was himself responsible for breeding many of these stereotypes. He was so successful at establishing this image of himself and his poetry that, after his death, the publication of the three volumes of his official biography occasioned a scandal and a backlash. Over hundreds of pages, the biographer relentlessly and one-sidedly documents every instance of pettiness, jealousy, and mean-spiritedness in a very long life, presenting Frost as an emotional cannibal who at every turn sacrificed his loved ones to his artistic ambitions. Like everyone, Frost was a flawed human being, but he was hardly the monster shown here; others have given ample testimony to his generosity and love as a friend, a parent, and a husband. In a life more painful than most, Frost struggled heroically with his inner and outer demons, and out of that struggle he produced what many consider to be the single greatest body of work by any American poet of the twentieth century.

As a poet, Robert Frost was greatly influenced by the emotions and events of everyday life. Within a seemingly banal event from a normal daywatching the ice weigh down the branches of a birch tree, mending the stones of a wall, mowing a field of hayFrost 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. Frosts 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 Frosts work. The raw emotion and sense of loss that pervades Frosts 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, Frosts 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. Frosts 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 Frosts poetic style, it does speak to the accessibility and simplicity that has made Frosts 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 Laniers 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 Frosts 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, Frosts 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.

"Mending Wall" (1914)

Every year, two neighbors meet to repair the stone wall that divides their property. The narrator is skeptical of this tradition, unable to understand the need for a wall when there is no livestock to be contained on the property, only apples and pine trees. He does not believe that a wall should exist simply for the sake of existing. Moreover, he cannot help but notice that the natural world seems to dislike the wall as much as he does: mysterious gaps appear, boulders fall for no reason. The neighbor, on the other hand, asserts that the wall is crucial to maintaining their relationship, asserting, Good fences make good neighbors. Over the course of the mending, the narrator attempts to convince his neighbor otherwise and accuses him of being old-fashioned for maintaining the tradition so strictly. No matter what the narrator says, though, the neighbor stands his ground, repeating only: Good fences make good neighbors.

"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.

"Fire and Ice" (1923)

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.

"The Road Not Taken" (1916)

The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing. 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). The narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how

different things would have been had he chosen the other path.

"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.

Nature as a Theme in Frosts Poetry

Frost places a great deal of importance on Nature in all of his collections. Because of the time he spent in New England, the majority of pastoral scenes that he describes are inspired by specific locations in New England. However, Frost does not limit himself to stereotypical pastoral themes such as sheep and shepherds. 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") and the destructive side of nature (as in "Once by the Pacific"). Frost also presents the natural world as one that inspires deep metaphysical thought in the individuals who are exposed to it (as in "Birches" and "The Sound of Trees"). For Frost, Nature is not simply a background for poetry, but rather a central character in his works. His poetry is largely based on his experiences with the life and scenery of rural New England. Frost regarded nature as beautiful but sometimes perilous. Frost uses nature as a metaphor, primarily in his poems to express the intentions of his poems. He uses nature as a background metaphor in which he usually begins a poem with an observation of something in nature and then moves towards a connection to some human situation. He uses rural landscapes, homely farmers and the natural world to illustrate his human psychology struggle with everyday situations. Frosts nature poetry occupies a significant place in the poetic arts, however it is likely that Frosts use of nature is the most misunderstood aspect of his poetry. While nature is always present in Frosts writing, it is primarily used in a pastoral sense. Frost uses nature as an image that he wants us to see or a metaphor that he wants us to relate to at a psychological level. His nature poetry connects the world of the natural and the world of human beings. Thus Frost sees

in nature a symbol of mans relation to the world. Though he writes about a forest or wild flowers, his real subject is humanity. The remoteness of nature reveals the tragedy of mans isolation and his weakness in the face of vast impersonal forces. There is a fundamental ambiguity of feeling in Frosts view of nature. He views it as mans cruel task manager, brutish, destructive, yet it is to be loved because it puts man to test and thus brings out his true greatness. Such ambiguity indicates the poetic potential of Frosts nature. We may see this Frosts Birches, where the delicate balance between the desire to withdraw from the world and love of earth is symbolized in the boys game of swinging birch trees. Though his concept of nature does not allow for the sublimity one finds in Wordsworth, it has richness of its own. It is a paradox and it points towards the greater paradox in man himself. The struggle between the human imagination and the meaningless void man confronts the subject of poem after poem. Admittedly Frost can and does enjoy nature. His flowers, trees, animals are all described with affection, yet none of his nature poems are free from hints of possible danger. Frosts affection for nature, like his fear of it is based on a sense of analogy. On speaking of Frosts dualistic view of nature as an alien force capable of destroying man but on flip side he also views mans struggle with nature. This implies that nature has the capacity to destroy man yet it lets us thrive. Nature becomes both friend and foe together. Frosts nature poetry is more than blooming flowers and snowy nights, there is an underlying meaning in most of his poems. A critic says, Frost does not formulate a theory of nature or of mans relationship with nature. However it seems that Frost believes that man should live in harmony with nature and not go against it.

Other major themes in Frosts poetry

Communication
Communication or the lack thereof, 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. For example, 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. Frost highlights this inability to communicate by writing the poem in free verse dialogue; each character speaks clearly to the reader, but neither is able to understand the other. Frost explores a similar theme in "Acquainted with the Night," in which the narrator is unable to pull himself out of his depression because he cannot bring himself even to make eye contact with those around him. In each of these cases, the reader is left with the knowledge that communication could have saved the characters from their isolation. Yet, because of an unwillingness to take the steps necessary to create a relationship with another person, the characters are doomed.

Everyday Life
Frost is very interested in the activities of everyday life, because it is this side of humanity that is the most "real" to him. Even the most basic act in a normal day can have numerous hidden meanings that need only to be explored by a poetic mind. For example, in the poem "Mowing,"

the simple act of mowing hay with a scythe is transformed into a discussion of the value of hard work and the traditions of the New England countryside. As Frost argues in the poem, by focusing on "reality," the real actions of real people, a poet can sift through the unnecessary elements of fantasy and discover "Truth." Moreover, Frost believes that the emphasis on everyday life allows him to communicate with his readers more clearly; they can empathize with the struggles and emotions that are expressed in his poems and come to a greater understanding of "Truth" themselves.

Isolation of the Individual

This theme is closely related to the theme of communication. The majority of the characters in Frost's poems are isolated in one way or another. Even the characters who show no sign of depression or loneliness, such as the narrators in "The Sound of Trees" or "Fire and Ice," are still presented as detached from the rest of society, isolated because of their unique perspective. In some cases, the isolation is a far more destructive force. 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. This heightened isolation keeps the character from fulfilling his potential as an individual and ultimately makes him a prisoner of his own making. Yet, as Frost suggests, this isolation can be avoided by interactions with other members of society; if the character in "The Lockless Door" could have brought himself to open the door and face an invasion of his isolation, he could have achieved a greater level of personal happiness.

Duty
Duty is a very important value in the rural communities of New England, so it is not surprising that Frost employs it as one of the primary themes of his poetry. 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. This conflict is particularly clear in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," 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. Similarly, in "The Sound of Tree," Frost describes a character who wants to follow the advice of the trees and make the "reckless" decision to leave his community. At the end of the poem, the character does not choose to leave (yet) because his sense of duty to those around him serves as the roots that keep him firmly grounded.

Rationality versus Imagination

This theme is similar to the theme of duty, in that the hardworking people whom Frost describes in his poetry are forced to choose between rationality and imagination; the two cannot exist simultaneously. The adults in Frost's poetry generally maintain their rationality as a burden of duty, but there are certain cases when the hint of imagination is almost too seductive to bear. For example, 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. As a result of this conflict, Frost makes the poem "Out, Out--" even more tragic, describing a young boy who is forced to leave his childhood behind to work at a man's job and ultimately dies in the process.

Rural Life versus Urban Life

This theme relates to Frost's interest in Nature and everyday life. Frost's experience growing up in New England exposed him to a particular way of life that seemed less complicated and yet more meaningful than the life of a city dweller. The farmers whom Frost describes in his poetry have a unique perspective on the world as well as a certain sense of honor and duty in terms of their work and their community. Frost is not averse to examining urban life in his poetry; in "Acquainted with the Night," the narrator is described as being someone who lives in a large city. However, Frost has more opportunities to find metaphysical meaning in everyday tasks and explore the relationship between mankind and nature through the glimpses of rural life and farming communities that he expresses in his poetry. Urban life is "real," but it lacks the quality and clarity of life that is so fascinating to Frost in his work.

Quotes and Analysis

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. "The Road Not Taken" This quotation is significant because it demonstrates Frost's ironic treatment of the narrator. In the first three stanzas of the poem, the narrator states that the two paths are fundamentally identical in every way. He chose one path and contemplated returning one day to try the other path, but did not agonize over the decision. In the fourth stanza, however, when the narrator is an old man, he changes the truth of what happened and describes his path as the one "less traveled by." This shift in the truth allows the old man to justify many of his life choices and perhaps explain why his life turned out the way that it did.

Good fences make good neighbors. "Mending Wall" This quotation is perhaps one of the most frequently quoted lines from Frost's poetry. The neighbour repeats the adage three times over the course of the poem and, though the narrator is

initially sceptical of his neighbours appreciation of an old-fashioned tradition, he eventually begins to agree with the adage as well. This line highlights the importance of property and individuality in the United States. Although the wall is not necessary in a practical sense (the narrator's apple trees will not cross the property line to bother his neighbor's pine trees), it maintains each man's individual identity in the farm community and allows them to have a sense of pride in their ownership of the land. Even on a more basic level, the act of mending the wall allows the neighbours to develop their relationship through interpersonal communication.

Some say the earth will end in fire, Some say in ice. "Fire and Ice" This quotation introduces the two sides of the debate on the world's fate. The narrator clarifies the strict dichotomy between the elements while also revealing that this is not an expression of an individual opinion, but rather a universal understanding. The world must end in one of these two contradictory ways - or at least that is what the reader is expected to believe. In the next line, however, the narrator undercuts this conclusion by introducing his own opinion and acknowledging that the world could easily end both ways; thus, fire and ice are inherently similar.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. "Birches" This selection appears in the final line of the poem and serves as a thoughtful reiteration of the narrator's ideas about swinging on birches. The act of swinging on a birch conveys a certain childlike innocence, but also allows the swinger to escape the cold rationality of the earth for a short time and reach into the heavens. Although the swinger is still grounded (through the roots of the birch tree), he is able to find freedom of imagination and also keep his life from becoming static.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" This selection occurs at the very end of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." It is clear that the narrator wishes to continue watching the snow fall in the woods, but he is not able to ignore his responsibilities. The repeated "And miles to go before I sleep" can be read as a forced reminder that the narrator has obligations to fulfill, almost as if he would not be able to force himself to leave the woods without repeating the mantra. The final line could also be read as the narrator slowly falling asleep, aware of his responsibilities at home but unable to resist the peaceful lull of the drifting snow.