Analysis of Three Poems Written by Robert Frost

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Robert Frost, a poet was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California and died in 1963. Many world changing events happened in his lifetime such as the stock market crash and World War II to name a few. He began seriously writing poetry in high school and continued to write all his life. He was starting to gain publicity in 1915 and in 1961 read his poem “The Gift Outright” during President John F Kennedy’s inauguration.
There are three of his poems that I will be writing about in this essay: “The Mending Wall”, “The Road Not Taken”, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Day.” In these poems the symbols are nearly all some form of nature such as the horse, the road, the wall, etc. Robert Frost used those symbols to portray life dilemmas and issues in the way that we relate to one another and making tough choices.
For instance in The Mending Wall, he uses the wall as a symbol of how we build up walls in our relationships “What was I walling in or walling out, to whom was I like to give offense.” In this poem he didn’t want the walls up, he wished to be free off them and speak freely. The neighbor though insisted the wall be up, “Good fences make good neighbors.” We don’t realize sometimes that our walls we put up cause others pain and confusion. The hunters would come to destroy the wall and bring everything out, “Where they had left not one stone on stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, to please the yelping dogs.” The hunters could be people trying to find gossip and slander, as a result where things were starting to loosen up in the relationship they just ripped it apart. The rabbits seem to be secrets or hurts from the past and yelping dogs could symbolize nosey people that gossip and loudly proclaim the secret or h...

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... the other "because it was grassy and wanting of wear" which hints that the road he chose was not popular. He always kept the option of the other choice open if he ever wanted to leave the other to go that way, but he is happy with his choice because he says "I doubted if I would ever come back". The road he took was the harder road and that is how he made it so far. “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost through symbols in nature tells us about the importance of letting people in. He shows us in beautiful analogies the difficulty of turning your back on something that you want, because it is a mistake that will follow you the rest of your life. Finally he shows in his wonderful way that in life the easy road is not always the better road. I enjoyed getting to know Robert Frost and am planning to read more of his work.

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