To Live or To Die? (To Be or Not To Be) I chose the poem, Reluctance, by Robert Frost because it teaches an impactful, crucial life lesson. I would like to reflect on three aspects of the poem, the structure, the mood and the poetic devices. The lesson of the poem is overcoming suicide. Suicide is a form of betrayal to yourself because everyone has more to their life, and this is one thing I want to bring more awareness to others. Suicide is making a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I want people to know life is a roller coaster filled with numerous numbers of ups and downs. If Frost had simply given up on his life because he was rejected by his future wife, he would have never gotten married to her in the end. Life is unpredictable, so I want others to know not to give up so easily, without fighting. The poem is structured as four, six lines stanzas. Within each stanza there are different ideas that all tie in perfectly together with the themes of nature, death, desire, passage of time and love. The narrator talks about his experiences by saying,” Out through the fields and the wood. And over the …show more content…
In the poem when summer has come to an end, I perceive that his relationship has ended. I sensed Frost’s reluctance to continue life because of the rejection. The narrator begins to talk about death of nature, and at this time of Frost’s life, he was harshly rejected by his future wife. The rejection deeply impacted him because it gave him the thought of suicide. The decaying leaves and withered flower are a symbol of death. In the poem Frost writes, “To go with the drift of things”. It would be a betrayal to himself if he gave up without fighting for what he wants. He decides not to go with the drift of things. If he went with the drift of things, he would have killed and himself, which is “committing a reason to his heart”. Instead of denying what has happened, he accepted the
First of alll, the poem is divided into nine stanzas, where each one has four lines. In addition to that, one can spot a few enjambements for instance (l.9-10). This stylistic device has the function to support the flow of the poem. Furthermore, it is crucial to take a look at the choice of words, when analysing the language.
The poet begins by describing the scene to paint a picture in the reader’s mind and elaborates on how the sky and the ground work in harmony. This is almost a story like layout with a beginning a complication and an ending. Thus the poem has a story like feel to it. At first it may not be clear why the poem is broken up into three- five line stanzas. The poet deliberately used this line stanzas as the most appropriate way to separate scenes and emotions to create a story like format.
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” Robert Frost once said. As is made fairly obvious by this quote, Frost was an adroit thinker. It seems like he spent much of his life thinking about the little things. He often pondered the meaning and symbolism of things he found in nature. Many readers find Robert Frost’s poems to be straightforward, yet his work contains deeper layers of complexity beneath the surface. His poems are not what they seem to be at first glance. These deeper layers of complexity can be clearly seen in his poems “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice”, and “Birches”.
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker starts by telling the reader the place, time and activity he is doing, stating that he saw something that he will always remember. His description of his view is explained through simile for example “Ripe apples were caught like red fish in the nets of their branches” (Updike), captivating the reader’s attention
Frost is far more than the simple agrarian writer some claim him to be. He is deceptively simple at first glance, writing poetry that is easy to understand on an immediate, superficial level. Closer examination of his texts, however, reveal his thoughts on deeply troubling psychological states of living in a modern world. As bombs exploded and bodies piled up in the World Wars, people were forced to consider not only death, but the aspects of human nature that could allow such atrocities to occur. By using natural themes and images to present modernist concerns, Frost creates poetry that both soothes his readers and asks them to consider the true nature of the world and themselves.
Frost’s sentence structure is long and complicated. Many meanings of his poems are not revealed to the reader through first glance, but only after close introspection of the poem. The true meanings contained in Frost’s poems, are usually lessons on life. Frost uses symbolism of nature and incorporates that symbolism into everyday life situations. The speaker in the poems vary, in the poem “The Pasture”, Frost seems to be directly involved in the poem, where as in the poem “While in the Rose Pogonias”, he is a detached observer, viewing and talking about the world’s beauty. Subsequently, the author transfers that beauty over to the beauty of experiences that are achieved through everyday life.
Frost uses a religious allusion to further enforce the objective of the poem. Whether Frost's argument is proven in a religious or scientific forum, it is nonetheless true. In directly citing these natural occurrences from inanimate, organic things such as plants, he also indirectly addresses the phenomena of aging in humans, in both physical and spiritual respects. Literally, this is a poem describing the seasons. Frosts interpretation of the seasons is original in the fact that it is not only autumn that causes him grief, but summer.
The persona begins to think about how he cannot take both paths and be the same “traveler”
The Road not taken is a poem written about making the right decisions in life and being who you are. The poems written by Robert Frost In the poem he talks about taking the path less traveled and how happy it made him. This is a very powerful poem and helps people realize they don't have to be like everyone else.
In relation to structure and style, the poem contains six stanzas of varying lengths. The first, second, and fourth stanzas
The construction of the poem is in regular four-line stanzas, of which the first two stanzas provide the exposition, setting the scene; the next three stanzas encompass the major action; and the final two stanzas present the poet's reflection on the meaning of her experience.
¡°The Road Not Taken¡± by Robert Frost is s poem of description as he was revealing what he experienced when he had to make a decision. The physical journey Robert Frost described in his poem was there were two different ways for him to choose where they would both end to the same place.
Nature is an important theme in every frost poem. Nature usually symbolizes age or other things throughout Frost’s poems. In lines 5-10 it says, “Often you must have seen them loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain. They click upon themselves as the breeze rises, and turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel. Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells.” This demonstrates how nature can sometimes symbolize something. Also in lines 29-33 it says, “ By riding them down over and over again until he took the stiffness out of them, and not one but hung limp, not one was left for him to conquer. He learned all there was to learn about not launching too soon.” In lines 44-48 it says, And life is too much like a pathless wood where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs broken across it, and one eye is weeping from a twig’s having lashed across it open. I’d like to get away from earth for a while.”
The vivid imagery, symbolism, metaphors make his poetry elusive, through these elements Frost is able to give nature its dark side. It is these elements that must be analyzed to discover the hidden dark meaning within Roberts Frost’s poems. Lines that seemed simple at first become more complex after the reader analyzes the poem using elements of poetry. For example, in the poem Mending Wall it appears that Robert frost is talking about two man arguing about a wall but at a closer look the reader realizes that the poem is about the things that separate man from man, which can be viewed as destructive. In After Apple Picking, the darkness of nature is present through the man wanting sleep, which is symbolic of death. It might seem that the poem is about apple picking and hard work but it is actually about the nature of death.
Perhaps one of the most well-known poems in modern America is a work by Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken. This poem consists of four stanzas that depict the story of the narrator traveling through the woods early in the morning and coming upon a fork in the path, where he milled about for a while before deciding upon one of the two paths, wishing he could take both, but knowing otherwise, seeing himself telling of this experience in the future.