Robert Frost's Desert Places

890 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: T. s. Eliot waste land essay

Robert Frost's Desert Places

One of the most monumental poetic works of T.S Eliot is ‘The Waste Land’. The poem emerges as a gigantic metaphor for melancholy, loneliness, solitude- the unavoidable companions of human existence. Similar kinds of feelings are evoked by Robert Frost in ‘Desert Places’.

The very title is suggestive of a mood of emptiness. Throughout our life we cross various deserts to find our destiny. The beauty of the poem lies in the conjunction – the meeting point desert outside in the nature with the desert inside. This becomes the focal point of the poem. The dreary opening is indicated by the falling snow and the advancing night. The poet observes the scenario as the snow blankets the earth and the darkness descends on the whole scene. Two factors which play an important role in the dawning of the mood are snow and night.

The falling snow soon covers the irregular jagged surface of the earth and this visual scene is gradually overwhelming the senses and sensitivity as the mind is going in a state of numbness. In such a state of numbness one becomes concerned and confined with ones own self. The poet is trying to find refuge in the lap of nature but the cold whiffs of night seals out his approach. The falling snow has further aggravated the chances of his meeting with nature.

‘I’ shows the approach towards nature slowing down and caving in one’s own self. The poet traces his steps back to his memories for some warmth in this snowy landscape....

Show More
Related

  • Comparing Winter Evening And Stories Of Snow By P. K. Page

    844 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Winter Evening” by Archibald Lampman, and “Stories of Snow” by P.K Page are two poems describing the human experience of winter. Winter is seen, by some, to be blissful, magical and serene. Winter could also be described as pure and heavenly, with the white snow resembling clouds. However, others have a contrasting viewpoint; they paint winter in harsher light, giving the impression that winter is bitter and ruthless. Others still, have a mixed viewpoint and may recognize both the positives and negatives to the season.

    Read More

  • Pre-1600 Styles in European Art Music

    905 Words  | 2 Pages

    1. Music is a strictly local expression, rich in variety since each culture expresses affective differences through art, 2. Music is a poetic process--complex, vague, and irrational--based upon borrowed traditional musical materials (melodies, rhythms, forms, etc.), 3. Music is for a religious, elitist-class performer who can understand and appreciate its mysterious nature and power, 4. Music is played softly in intimate gatherings, 5. Music making is the activity of Everyman, exacting the talents of variously trained amateurs who, with industry and practice, decorate their recreation and leisure in moments of social intercourse.

    Read More

  • Romanticism: Human's Connection With Nature In 'Snowbound'

    1599 Words  | 4 Pages

    As characters in the poem are literally snow bound, they find that the natural occurrence actually serves a relaxing and warming purpose, one that brings together family. This effect is further achieved through the use of meter throughout the work as a whole. In its simplistic yet conversational tone, the author uses meter to depict the result that nature has forced upon these humans, who are but a small sample size that actually is representative of society that that time. Due to nature, the characters can talk, represented by the conversational meter, and thus, they can bond within the family. A larger representation of this more specific example can be applied to a more general perspective of human’s relationship with the natural world. Although “Snowbound” captures what humans do as a result of nature, it can also represent a larger picture, where nature appears at the most opportune times to enhance relationships from human to human. In “snowbound,” this is symbolized by the fire, “Our warm hearth seemed blazing free” (Whittier 135). This image relays a spirited, warm, mood full of security, which is expertly used by the author to show how fire, a natural phenomena, can provide such beneficial effects on humans. This very occurrence exemplifies how such a miniscule aspect of nature can have such a profound effect on a family, leaving the reader wondering what nature and its entirety could accomplish if used as a

    Read More

  • Summary Of Jane Kenyon's Poem Let Evening Come By Jane Kenyon

    1008 Words  | 3 Pages

    There have been many American poets throughout the centuries, but none compared to Robert Frost and Jane Kenyon. Jane Kenyon and Robert Frost can make the simplest thing such as picking a pear into something darker. Often Jane Kenyon and Robert Frost compose themes of nature, loneliness and death into their poetry. Both poets evoke feelings and stimulate the reader’s sensory reactions. Jane Kenyon’s Poem Let Evening Comes (1990) and Robert Frost’s Poem Desert Places (1936) may have been written in different eras, but both poets collaborate nature, spirituality and emotional solitariness in their poems.

    Read More

  • Field of Autumn, by Laurie Lee

    827 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem, “Field of Autumn”, by Laurie Lee exposes the languorous passage of time along with the unavoidability of closure, more precisely; death, by describing a shift of seasons. In six stanzas, with four sentences each, the author also contrasts two different branches of time; past and future. Death and slowness are the main motifs of this literary work, and are efficiently portrayed through the overall assonance of the letter “o”, which helps the reader understand the tranquility of the poem by creating an equally calmed atmosphere. This poem is to be analyzed by stanzas, one per paragraph, with the exception of the third and fourth stanzas, which will be analyzed as one for a better understanding of Lee’s poem.

    Read More

  • Jim Thorpe Accomplishments

    812 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jim Thorpe had an incredible life and impacted sports history forever. He had a very interesting and eventful life and it all started out by just working at home, he never had even played sports before. Before long he was in the Olympics, Professional Football and Baseball, and so much more. He was an all around athlete and he didn’t know for years. People loved Thorpe so much that after his death, they named many things after him and did lots of things to make sure he was remembered. Here’s his incredible story.

    Read More

  • How Musical Is Man By John Blacking

    636 Words  | 2 Pages

    The book is divided into four chapters: 1) Humanly Organized Sound, 2) Music in Society and Culture, 3) Culture and Society in Music, and 4) Soundly Organized Humanity. In chapter one, Blacking discusses the analysis of sound. He begins by describing music as humanly organized sound. His overarching theme is that “the function of tones in relation to each other cannot be explained adequately as part of a closed system” (30). In other words, music can’t be analyzed simply by one set of rules. This is because every single culture has a different system that they use to structure and compose their music. In order to adequately analyze a society’s music we have to study their “system.” We must learn what music means to them. Then, and only then, can we accurately and completely analyze what a particular type or piece of music means to a particular society and culture.

    Read More

  • Music, Emotion and Language: Using Music to Communicate

    3292 Words  | 7 Pages

    There has yet to be a culture discovered which lacks music. Making music is seen historically to be as fundamental as the characteristically human activities as drawing and painting. Many even go so far as to compare music to language and claim that music functions as a "universal language." But it is rarely the same music, however, that all peoples respond to. What is it that we are responding to when we listen to music? Strictly speaking, music is not a language, (1) because it has neither outside referents nor easily detectable meaning. Ludwig Wittgenstein explains that although we understand music in a similar way as we understand language, music is not a language because we still cannot communicate through music as we can through language. (2) More recently, Susanne Langer argues that although we understand music as symbol, because we are so caught up in seeing symbolic form function like language we tend to want to make music into a language. But, Langer argues, music is not a kind of language (3) because the significance of music lies not in w...

    Read More

  • Loneliness and Isolation in Robert Frost's Poem

    1013 Words  | 3 Pages

    Robert Frost, an infamous poet best known for his original poetic technique, displays a reoccurring idea or theme of loneliness and isolation throughout many of his published works. The ways in which Frost represents and symbolizes ideas of solitude and desolation in poems are somehow slightly or very different. Loneliness and isolation are illustrated through Frost’s use of the dark night as well as depression in “Acquainted With the Night”, the objects the speaker encounters in “Waiting”, and the sense of abandonment and death in “Ghost House.”

    Read More

  • Waste Land Essay: Eliot's Use of Different Speakers

    688 Words  | 2 Pages

    Different speakers in "The Waste Land" mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20th-century life -- various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind -- have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this time period is forced to shore these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.

    Read More

  • Water and Religious Motifs in The Waste Land, by T.S. Eliot

    1524 Words  | 4 Pages

    In his poem "The Waste Land," T.S. Eliot employs a water motif, which represents both death and rebirth. This ties in with the religious motif, as well as the individual themes of the sections and the theme of the poem as a whole, that modern man is in a wasteland, and must be reborn.

    Read More

  • Message of Hope in Eliot's The Waste Land, Gerontion, and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

    2421 Words  | 5 Pages

    ...In "The Waste Land," Eliot delivers an indictment against the self-serving, irresponsibility of modern society, but not without giving us, particularly the youth a message of hope at the end of the Thames River. And in "Ash Wednesday," Eliot finally describes an example of the small, graceful images God gives us as oases in the Waste Land of modern culture. Eliot constantly refers back, in unconsciously, to his childhood responsibilities of the missionary in an unholy world. It is only through close, diligent reading of his poetry that we can come to understand his faithful message of hope.

    Read More

  • The Snow Man Wallace Stevens Analysis

    1008 Words  | 3 Pages

    “The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens, dramatizes a metaphorical “mind of winter”, and introduces the idea that one must have a certain mindset in order to correctly perceive reality. The poet, or rather the Snow Man, is an interpreter of simple and ordinary things; “A cold wind, without interpretation, has no misery” (Poetry Genius). Through the use of imageries and metaphors relating to both wintery landscapes and the Snow Man itself, Stevens illustrates different ideas of human objectivity and the abstract concept of true nothingness. Looking through the eyes of the Snow Man, the readers are given an opportunity to perceive a reality that is free from objectivity; The Snow Man makes it clear that winter can possess qualities of beauty and also emptiness: both “natural wonder, and human misery”. He implies that winter can also be nothing at all: “just a bunch of solid water, dormant plants, and moving air.” (The Wondering Minstrels). “One must

    Read More

  • T.S. Eliot’s Powerful Use of Fragmentation in The Waste Land

    2713 Words  | 6 Pages

    T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is an elaborate and mysterious montage of lines from other works, fleeting observations, conversations, scenery, and even languages. Though this approach seems to render the poem needlessly oblique, this style allows the poem to achieve multi-layered significance impossible in a more straightforward poetic style. Eliot’s use of fragmentation in The Waste Land operates on three levels: first, to parallel the broken society and relationships the poem portrays; second, to deconstruct the reader’s familiar context, creating an individualized sense of disconnection; and third, to challenge the reader to seek meaning in mere fragments, in this enigmatic poem as well as in a fractious world.

    Read More

  • Nature in "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth

    867 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth is about the poet’s mental journey in nature where he remembers the daffodils that give him joy when he is lonely and bored. The poet is overwhelmed by nature’s beauty where he thought of it while lying alone on his couch. The poem shows the relationship between nature and the poet, and how nature’s motion and beauty influences the poet’s feelings and behaviors for the good. Moreover, the process that the speaker goes through is recollected that shows that he isolated from society, and is mentally in nature while he is physically lying on his couch. Therefore, William Wordsworth uses figurative language and syntax and form throughout the poem to express to the readers the peace and beauty of nature, and to symbolize the adventures that occurred in his mental journey.

    Read More

More about Robert Frost's Desert Places

Open Document