The Deterioration Of Marriage In Robert Frost's Home Burial

Robert Frost’s dramatic poem Home Burial depicts two tragedies: the loss of an infant and the deterioration of a marriage that follows. The emotional dialogue characterizes husband and wife with their habits of speech, illustrating the ways that they deal with grief. Instead of comforting her in her distress, the husband attempts at every turn to force his wife to cease grieving. The unnamed farmer’s inability to console his wife, who seems to feel so much more deeply the loss of her child, combined with her inability to see any feeling at all in her husband’s actions, contribute to a conflict that seems unresolvable by the end of the poem. But Frost’s diction suggests that it is the husband’s style of communication, not his method of grieving, that is the true cause of the vast distance between the two.

The distance between the couple is established from the first sentence, "He saw her from the bottom of the stairs / Before she saw him. She was staring down.” The husband’s question, "What is it you see / From up there always—for I want to know," tells us with the word “always” that this he has often before observed his wife in this position at the top of the stairs, and suggests that the distance between them is no new development. His intentions may be good, but the husband’s request is not put delicately—the phrase “for I want to know” sends the message that his wife is to disclose her thoughts purely because it is his will. In response to this demand, she “turn[s] and s[inks] upon her skirts” into a meek, feminine position, resigned to questioning, but the next line, "And her face changed from terrified to dull," describes her donning an unresponsive mask, and makes it clear that she will not be answering her husb...

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...r. / You won't go now" has a grown-up's condescension toward a child. He seems to think that women are oversensitive beings, who exaggerate, tell all, weep, and then are all right. The man's "You're crying. Close the door. / The heart's gone out of it: why keep it up" shows this quite as strikingly; he feels that he can manipulate her back into the house and into his life, back out of the grief that—he thinks or hopes—no longer has any heart in it, so that she must pettily and exhaustingly "keep it up." But at this moment when the proper treatment might get her back into the house and his life, someone happens to come down the road, and may look at the scene through the open door. Public opinion is more important to him than his wife at that moment. He forgets everything else, and says "Amy! There’s someone coming down the road!" The fear of public disgrace, even