The main theme within Robert Frost "Home Burial" is the contrasting emotions dealing with the death of their child between man and wife. In “Home Burial” the setting centers around the tragic death of a child. This poem was written in 1914, times were very different then, men didn’t grieve openly, it was shown as a sign of weakness, they needed to be strong for their family, knowing the year this poem was written can give the reader a better insight to understanding the husband’s reaction to the death of the child, what may appear to be cold and heartless today wasn’t necessarily cold and heartless in the early 1900s men tended to have dealt with conflicts by working hard. The man and women have very different methods of mourning their child, which isn’t really the problem the problem is they don’t understand or can’t accept how one another mourns. The poem “Home Burial” demonstrates how one loss can lead to another loss in this case the loss of a child lead to the loss of a marriage.
The baby is buried in the family graveyard, which can be seen from an upstairs window of their house. Every day the mother walks by that window and can’t help but see the raw mound where her child was buried. The mother is grieving openly for the loss of her child, she hasn’t yet found away to deal with her grief and has not moved on with her day to day but most people in this position gradually work out a way of dealing with their grief, and go on with their lives. She has more than the emotion of grief, she is angry and bitter towards her husband who at first is not understood why would she be so angry towards him? They should be coming together as a family to comfort each other during this time.
As the poem begins, the wife is l...
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...lines (75-79). When the husband was burying his son, the reader could see himself or herself there. With the gravel flying and making it “leap” into the air. In the mind’s eye one could see the gravel sliding back into the hole. We could actually visualize the mound getting higher. There were three different tragedies that transpired throughout this poem. The burial of the child was first; second was the burial of the marriage and finally the most symbolic and ironic tragedy is the burial of the home. Because of unfortunate circumstances these three things became closely associated with the home being buried. All of these tragedies occurred as a result of the child’s burial. The couple’s marriage could not survive such an emotional loss. Therefore the marriage becomes buried. When the marriage became buried the home became its own burial spot for this family’s life.
The speaker’s personal emotions emphasizes the poem’s theme since although his father is no longer with him in this world, the memory of his father will always live in his heart. Throughout the poem, Lee uses the sky, underground, and the heart to symbolize imagination, reality, and memory—emphasizing the poem’s theme of the remembrance of a loved one. Lee also uses repetition to convey the meaning of Little Father. The speaker repeatedly mentions “I buried my father…Since then…” This repetition displays the similarity in concepts, however the contrast in ideas. The first stanza focuses on the spiritual location of the speaker’s father, the second stanza focuses on the physical location of the father, and the third stanza focuses on the mental location of the speaker’s father. This allows the reader to understand and identify the shift in ideas between each stanza, and to connect these different ideas together—leading to the message of despite where the loved one is (spiritually or physically), they’ll always be in your heart. The usage of word choice also enables the reader to read in first person—the voice of the speaker. Reading in the voice of the speaker allows the reader to see in the perspective of the speaker and to connect with the speaker—understand
through the pile of ashes that once used to be his poems. This part of the poem symbolizes
...s that have a much defined rhyme scheme. Therefore, the poem becomes a more serious and personal epilogue to seal the past behind him, perhaps, having therapeutic aspects for Frost himself in retelling the grief they (Frost and his wife) went through. The title of the poem ‘Home Burial’ itself could be read as a double-entendre; these being the death and the burial of a child and the symbolic death of a marriage. An alternative narrative line has been concluded by Benjamin West saying ‘The true subject of the poem – from a biographical perspective – is the death of Frost’s nephew, child of his sister-in-law Leona White Harvey, in 1895. It was her relationship with her husband that inspired the poem.’ (West:2011). This alternative opinion conveys that ‘Home Burial’ is not about Frost’s own life although many other critics conceive it is about the death of his son.
Poe has written a several different stories relating to being buried alive, “The Premature Burial” and “The Cask of Amontillado” being the most popular. Edgar Allan Poe “was one of the seminal American poets and short story writers of the nineteenth century” he was an influencer for writers like Charles Baudelaire and Jules Verne. Poe lost both of his parents as a child and was raised with a foster family and lost his foster mom early, too. He lost many of his loved ones throughout his life including his wife shortly after he was married. All of these losses had a significant effect on him and influenced his stories ("Edgar Allan Poe - Biography"). “The Cask of Amontillado is a well-known piece of literature by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s many losses were said to be somewhat of an influencer for many of his short stories. Dramatic irony in Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a strong feature of his poem reflecting the poets personal feeling about isolation in death. We the readers are exposed to the dramatic irony when we are shown Montresors plans for Fortunato.
The writing style of Edgar Allan Poe shows the writer to be of a dark nature. In this story, he focuses on his fascination of being buried alive. He quotes, “To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these [ghastly] extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.” page 58 paragraph 3. The dark nature is reflected in this quote, showing the supernatural side of Poe which is reflected in his writing and is also a characteristic of Romanticism. Poe uses much detail, as shown in this passage, “The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lusterless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity.” page 59 paragraph 2. The descriptive nature of this writing paints a vivid picture that intrigues the reader to use their imagination and visualize the scene presented in the text. This use of imagery ties with aspects of Romanticism because of the nature of the descriptions Poe uses. Describing the physical features of one who seems dead is a horrifying perspective as not many people thing about the aspects of death.
The diction Kenyon employs for her description of the poem’s physical and psychological setting serves as Kenyon’s primary means for presenting her argument regarding the nature of the mourning process and its failure to help those who have lost loved ones. The poem’s first stanza begins as follows, “Like primitives we buried the cat with his bowl. Bare-handed we scraped sand and gravel back into the hole(1-4).” The first two words, “like primitives,” give the reader immediate insight into Kenyon’s opinion regarding the nature of the burial itself. She sees it as a means of coming to grips with death that is less evolved than the mental state of those that it attempts to help. When the first stanza is interpreted as a whole, the reader is...
When Death stops for the speaker, he reins a horse-drawn carriage as they ride to her grave. This carriage symbolizes a hearse of which carries her coffin to her grave a day or two after her death. As they ride, they pass, “the School… / the Fields of Gazing Grain— / [and] the Setting Sun—” (lines 9-12). These three symbolize the speakers life, from childhood in the playgrounds, to labor in the fields, and finally to the setting sun of her life. When the speaker and Death arrive at the house, it is night.
The poem contains the central idea that many of these children never understood what home really means. In Native American culture the people venerate earth and it is referred to as mother nature which we see in the poem. The rails cut right through their home but they don’t view them like the average person. They view the tracks as if they are scars across mother earths face and her face is the Native American’s homeland. She is scarred for eternity but she is perfect in their dreams. This symbolism is ironic because the children try to reach home using the railroad that ruined natural life for them and many other Native Americans. In the second stanza the speaker says “The worn-down welts of ancient punishments lead back and fourth” (15-16). Which can be talking about the marks on the children’s bodies after getting caught while running away. But the “word-down welts” can also symbolize the welts that were put on mother nature throughout history. The last five lines of the poem sums up the symbol of hope through their memories and dreams. The last line of the poem says, “the spines of names and leaves.” (20-24). The “spines” symbolize the physical strength of the children and their ability to maintain hope individually “names”, and for their tribe
Robert Frost’s poem “Out, out” is set in Vermont during the late afternoon and is about a young boy who is cutting wood for the family stove and gets his hand cut off ultimately resulting in death. Frost uses this poem as a way to show that life has little sympathy for the dead. He does this by using many literary techniques such as imagery, personification, allusion, and blank verse. All of these techniques are important when understanding this poem because it helps to convey certain feeling and emotions from Frost’s perspective. The theme, symbols, and literary techniques Frost uses are essential in coming to terms with how to portray this poem.
...ttachment or emotion. Again, Heaney repeats the use of a discourse marker, to highlight how vividly he remembers the terrible time “Next morning, I went up into the room”. In contrast to the rest of the poem, Heaney finally writes more personally, beginning with the personal pronoun “I”. He describes his memory with an atmosphere that is soft and peaceful “Snowdrops and Candles soothed the bedside” as opposed to the harsh and angry adjectives previously used such as “stanched” and “crying”. With this, Heaney is becoming more and more intimate with his time alone with his brother’s body, and can finally get peace of mind about the death, but still finding the inevitable sadness one feels with the loss of a loved one “A four foot box, a foot for every year”, indirectly telling the reader how young his brother was, and describing that how unfortunate the death was.
This blues poem discusses an incredibly sensitive topic: the death of Trethewey’s mother, who was murdered by her ex-husband when Trethewey was nineteen. Many of her poetry was inspired by the emotions following this event, and recounting memories made thereafter. “Graveyard Blues” details the funeral for Trethewey’s mother, a somber scene. The flowing words and repetition in the poem allow the reader to move quickly, the three-line stanzas grouping together moments. The poem begins with heavy lament, and the immediate movement of the dead away from the living, “Death stops the body’s work, the soul’s a journeyman [author emphasis]” (Tretheway 8, line 6). Like the epitaph from Wayfaring Stranger, Trethewey indicates that the dead depart the world of the living to some place mysterious, undefined. The living remain, and undertake a different journey, “The road going home was pocked with holes,/ That home-going road’s always full of holes” (Trethewey 8, line 10-11). Trethewey indicates that the mourning is incredibly difficult or “full of holes”, as she leaves the funeral and her mother to return home. ‘Home’ in this poem has become indicative of that which is not Trethewey’s mother, or that which is familiar and comfortable, in vast contrast to the definition of home implied in the
To begin in “South”, Trethewey alludes to a battlefield where the bodies of African-American soldiers are left to decompose. “Unburied until earth’s green sheet pulled over them, unmarked by any headstones.” (46) This is the only time in the collection that the speaker ever refers to an unmarked grave. This is significant as these men were intentionally left to decompose and in the present, there is nothing to serve as a reminder to them, to the sacrifices which they made. Because of this we do not remember them, and they are lost to history. The bodies are left for such a long period of time that the earth, which moves extremely slowly, has to take action and bury the dead. This same idea is articulated within “Providence” where there is “a swamp where graves had been.” (42) This is significant as it is a callback to an image seen at the beginning of the collection in “Theories of Time and Space.” In this poem, there is a man-made beach that is referred to “26 miles of sand dumped on the mangrove swamp” (1). If the reader remembers this line it brings up the idea of a person purposely dumping sand on these graves, erasing them from sight and therefore from
In “Home Burial,” Robert Frost uses language and imagery to show how differently a man and a women deal with grief. The poem not only describes the grief the two feel for the loss of their child but also the impending death of a marriage. Frost shows this by using a dramatic style set in New England.
In the last two lines of the poem, the family does nothing after the boy dies. They do not grieve and merely “turned to their affairs”. A little understated, but simple to understand why. To readers, it seems disbelieving because we imagine the mother and sister breaking down into violent sobs and begging for the boy to come back to life. We also imagine the father blaming himself for allowing his son to handle such a dangerous tool at that age. But if we think about it, all of those things are meaningless. There is nothing the family could have done to save their boy. Therefore, Frost is straightforward with the fact that the family promptly moves
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.