Abou Ben Adhem [Wakes to An Angel] (poem)

ABOU BEN ADHEM

by Leigh Hunt

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—

 --  The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

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Poem Summary & Analysis - Lit Charts

Explanation of Verse by Leigh Hunt - Learn Insta

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Abou Ben Adhem (poem)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Abou Ben Adhem
by Leigh Hunt
First published in	The Amulet
Country	England
Genre(s)	Romantic Orientalism
Meter	Iambic pentameter (most of it)
Rhyme scheme	AABB CCDD
Publication date	1834
Lines	18

"Abou Ben Adhem"^[1] is a poem written in 1834^[2] by the English critic, essayist and poet Leigh Hunt. It concerns a pious Middle Eastern sheikh who finds the 'love of God' to have blessed him. The poem has been praised for its non-stereotypical depiction of an Arab. Hunt claims through this poem that true worship manifests itself through the acts of love and service that one shows one's fellowmen and women. The character of 'Abou Ben Adhem' is said to have been based on the ascetic Sufi mystic Ibrahim bin Adham. The poem, due to its Middle Eastern setting and spiritualistic undertones, can be considered an example of Romantic Orientalism.^[3][4] The first known appearance of this poem is in an album kept by the writer Anna Maria Hall, whose husband, Samuel Carter Hall published it in 1834, in his gift book The Amulet.^[5]

Analysis

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

The poem shows a surprisingly liberal attitude for its time, and espouses the belief that true worship is in the service of others. The angel is said to be a representation of God's omnipresence, which observes anything and anyone.

Apart from the end rhyme scheme, Hunt uses alliteration to enrich the cadence of the poem. Some examples are:

• Abou Ben Adhem  (Line 1)

• Deep dream of peace (Line 2)

• Nay, not so  (Line 11)

• I pray thee then (Line 13)

The poem is written in a narrative style, and it is structured into four stanzas of 5, 5, 4 and 4 lines. Here, the stanzas are ‘closed’ and so are the couplets (the pairs of rhyming lines), — i.e., they end with punctuation. While the poem is metrically flexible, it essentially displays an iambic pentameter style.^[6]

The poem draws from Arabian lore, where in the Islamic month of Nous Sha'ban, God takes the golden book of mankind and chooses those dear to Him who He will call in the coming year. Thus indirectly, this is also a poem about a ‘blessed death’. Leigh Hunt's source for this was Barthélemy d'Herbelot, Bibliothèque orientale, first published in 1697. However, while d'Herbelot has Abou-Ishak-Ben-Adhem ask God to write him down as one who loves the Lord ('écrivez-moi, je vous prie, pour l'amour d'eux, en qualité d'ami de ceux qui aiment Dieu'), the poem has him say "Write me as one, that loves his fellow men".^[6][5]

Russell Jones, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, writes that the identification of Abou Ben Adham with Ibrahim ibn Adham was through two notes by H. Beveridge and V.A. Smith in the same journal in 1909 and 1910.^[3]

In popular culture

The verse “Write me as one who loves his fellow men” came to be used in Hunt's epitaph,^[5] unveiled by Lord Haughton in 1869 at Kensal Green in North Kensington. The musical Flahooley features a genie named Abou Ben Atom, based on either Ibrahim or Abou played in the original 1951 Broadway production by Irwin Corey.^[7] It was used in the British satirical television programme Not the Nine O'Clock News, being simultaneously translated into mock Welsh by Rowan Atkinson.

The poem is mentioned as a subject for public recital by a child character in Arnold Bennett’s novel “Hilda Lessways”

In school curricula

"Abou Ben Adhem" is one of the prescribed poems in the 10th grade English Literature syllabus for the nationwide CISCE board exam in India.^[8]

References

1. ^ "Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt". Poetry Foundation. 2021-10-14. Retrieved 2021-10-14.
2. ^ "Poetry By Heart | Abou Ben Adhem". Retrieved 2021-10-14.
3. ^ 
   Jump up to:
   ^a b Jones, Russell (1997). "Leigh Hunt's Oriental Motifs: Abou Ben Adhem". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 7 (3): 389–397. ISSN 1356-1863.
4. ^ "LitCharts". LitCharts. Retrieved 2021-10-14.
5. ^ 
   Jump up to:
   ^a b c "Bonhams : HUNT (LEIGH) Autograph manuscript of his poem 'Abou Ben Adhem', 1855". www.bonhams.com. Retrieved 2021-10-14.
6. ^ 
   Jump up to:
   ^a b "Abou Ben Adhem Summary | Englicist". englicist.com. Retrieved 2021-10-14.
7. ^ "T. Rees Shapiro, "Irwin Corey, 102: Comedian Billed Himself as 'World's Foremost Authority'". Washington Post. February 8, 2017.
8. ^ "Appendix I: List of Prescribed Textbooks". Indian Certificate of Secondary Education Examination, Year 2021. Retrieved 10-5-2022.

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Prolific Poet, Essayist, and Journalist Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)

Leigh Hunt

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Leigh Hunt, prolific poet, essayist, and journalist, was a central figure of the Romantic movement in England. He produced a large body of poetry in a variety of forms: narrative poems, satires, poetic dramas, odes, epistles, sonnets, short lyrics, and translations from Greek, Roman, Italian, and French poems. His vivid descriptions and lyrical quality are noteworthy, as is his keen delight in nature, and he is a master of mood and atmosphere. As a poet, he played a major role in freeing the couplet from the rigidity of neoclassical practice. He had remarkable insights as a literary critic and discovered and introduced the public to many poets, among them John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning, and Alfred Tennyson. He encouraged many other writers, such as Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Walter Savage Landor, and Charles Dickens. He was a journalist of note and was editor of the influential Examiner from its inception in 1808 to his departure for Italy in 1821. He was also the author of a novel and several plays, two of which, A Legend of Florence (1840) and Lovers' Amazements (1858), were produced during his lifetime.

He was born James Henry Leigh Hunt on October 19, 1784 to, Isaac, a lawyer from Barbados, and Mary Shewell Hunt, the daughter of a wealthy merchant of Philadelphia. As staunch Tories, they were fled from Philadelphia to England at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. There, Isaac became a popular Anglican preacher but was so impractical and improvident that he spent a good deal of time in debtor's prison, of which Hunt has some of his earliest memories. Isaac Hunt did manage, though, to find his son a place in Christ's Hospital school in 1791. There, Hunt received all his formal education, staying until 1799

Hunt's first volume of poems, Juvenilia, was written at school and published by subscription in 1801 through the auspices of his father, who was able to amass a long list of notable subscribers from the United States as well as England. The volume contains translations, sonnets, pastorals, elegies, and hymns imitating Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray, and William Collins. It was an instant success, going through four editions by 1804 and was praised by leading literary reviews as showing promise for such a young poet.

After his schooling, Hunt served an apprenticeship as clerk to his barrister brother, Stephen, but disliked the work intensely. In 1805 his brother John started a weekly paper, The News. As drama critic for it, Hunt gained a reputation for being perceptive and impartial at a time when impartiality was rare. In fact, he was so intent upon being impartial that he refused the acquaintance of any actor whom he might have to review, lest the acquaintance color his criticism. His critical essays in The News were sufficiently popular that in 1807 he was able to publish a selection of them as Critical Essays on the Performers of the London Theatres. Hunt's real career as a journalist, however, began in 1808 when he became editor of The Examiner with his brother John as publisher. Very shortly after entering on the editorship, he felt it necessary to resign his clerkship in the war office, which he had held since 1803, because of a possible future conflict of interest with his liberal editorials. The Examiner became an influential weekly, and Hunt developed a wide reputation not only for his literary criticism but for his political essays. On July 3, 1809, after several years of courtship, Hunt married Marianne Kent, daughter of a court milliner.

In 1811, Hunt began editing the first of his many journals, The Reflector, a political magazine that includes essays and poetry. Hunt's satirical "The Feast of the Poets" was first published in the March 1812 issue of The Reflector. It is an attempt, with copious notes, at poetical criticism. In it Apollo descends for a feast with the chief contemporary poets but dismisses, with varying degrees of contempt, all except four—Thomas Campbell, Robert Southey, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Moore. In the 1814 edition, which was much altered from the original, William Wordsworth is hailed as "Prince of Bards" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and George Gordon, Lord Byron, are given places. This change caused apparent consternation among some reviewers since these poets had been summarily dismissed in the earlier version of the poem. Actually, however, most reviewers, whether writing favorably or unfavorably, seemed to be moved more by politics than critical judgment, the reason being that as outspoken liberal editor of The Examiner, Hunt had won many admirers but also many political enemies. Consequently, at least as long as he was editor, his literary works tended to be praised or damned according to the politics of the reviewer. Thus, on the one hand, Feast of the Poets was condemned "as despicable a performance as could well be produced. It is flimsy, feeble, unsustained and impertinent" (Satirist, April 1814) and on the other as a "lively" and "sublime" poem (Eclectic Review, June 1814; Champion, February 20, 1814).

On March 22, 1812 Hunt, in an Examiner editorial and as a part of an ongoing attack on the Prince Regent, slandered him as a fat "Adonis" of 50. As a result he and his brother John spent two years (February 3, 1813 to February 2, 1815) in prison and paid fines of £500 each. Hunt's was an unusual incarceration. He was permitted to continue editing The Examiner from prison, which he did with little change in the tone of his editorials. During his prison stay Hunt wrote his first long narrative poem, The Story of Rimini. It was particularly praised by Byron, who read drafts of the poem as it progressed and to whom it was eventually dedicated. Based on the few lines about Francesca di Rimini in Dante's Inferno, The Story of Rimini tells of the fatal passion between Paulo and Francesca, whom Paulo escorted from her home in Ravenna to Rimini, where she was to be married to his brother, Prince Giovanni, and the tragedy that follows the revelation of their love.

In 1816 Hunt made friends with Keats and renewed his friendship with Shelley, whom he had first met briefly in 1811. In December 1816 he introduced them and their poems to the public in the Examiner. Not long thereafter, John Gibson Lockhart, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine (October 1817), began his anonymous, bitter attacks on Hunt and his friends, whom he scornfully dubbed the "Cockney School." Lockhart, whose criticism of Keats and Hazlitt was particularly sharp, was shortly joined by the Quarterly Review, under the editorship of William Gifford. The attacks continued for several years, but except for a fruitless demand in the Examiner at the outset that the anonymous writer of the attacks in Blackwood's reveal his identity, Hunt did not answer save in defense of Keats and Shelley. Not only did Hunt, Keats, and Shelley visit frequently, but in 1817 Hunt and his entire family stayed in Marlowe with Shelley for several months, and in 1820 Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, stayed with Hunt for several months in his cottage at Hampstead Heath. During the many visits poetic skills were honed with poetry-writing competitions, and the heady relationships resulted in publication of several volumes of poetry by the three before Shelley and Keats went to Italy for their health in 1818 and 1820 respectively.

Hunt's most prolific period of poetic activity occurred in the years 1812 to 1820. In 1818 Hunt published Foliage, his first volume of poetry since Juvenilia, which includes one of his best poems, "The Nymphs." Hunt not only continued editing the Examiner, but also two more journals: The Literary Pocket Book, begun in 1818, and The Indicator (1819-1821), which contains essays full of good cheer, on literature, life, manners, morals, and nature. Lamb was so enthusiastic about it that he hailed it with a sonnet. In 1819, Hunt published two more narrative poems: "Hero and Leander," which retells the familiar story of Leander swimming the Hellespont to visit Hero, and "Bacchus and Ariadne," which describes the procession of Bacchus toward Ariadne, who has just been abandoned by Theseus on the isle of Naxos. Though shorter, they are like The Story of Rimini in their slight action but considerable lavish description and frequent appreciation of the physical. Peter George Patmore, the reviewer of these two poems for the London Magazine (July 1820), praised at length Hunt's delicate verse, love of nature, and originality. Also in 1819 The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt was published in three volumes including all the poems he had published to that time with the exception of his juvenile poems. Another narrative poem, Hunt's translation of Torquato Tasso's Amyntas, a Tale of the Woods, was printed in 1820.

In the fall of 1821 Shelley and Byron persuaded Hunt to come to Italy and edit a literary journal, eventually called The Liberal, that the three of them would write. Hunt set out on November 15, 1821 with his family, but frightful winter storms forced the ship to turn back. Because of further delays, he did not sail until May 13,1822 and arrived on July 1. Within days of Hunt’s arrival, Shelley drowned in a sudden squall during his return home to Lerici. Shelley's death not only shattered Hunt emotionally, but put him in a particularly difficult financial situation. He and his family of seven were destitute and in debt for the trip to Italy. Hunt had planned to live on the generosity offered by Shelley until The Liberal was established, but Shelley's death threw him on the mercy of Byron, who did not like Hunt much and detested his family. Furthermore, Shelley had been the chief spirit behind The Liberal, and his death left the uneasy partnership of Byron and Hunt to produce the journal. They held together barely long enough to publish four issues. The majority of each issue was written by Hunt with Byron contributing and Mary Shelley providing some previously unpublished short poems by Shelley. Other contributors included Hazlitt, Mary Shelley, Horace Smith, Charles Armitage Brown, and Thomas Jefferson Hogg. Among the poems Hunt published in The Liberal was "The Dogs," a political satire suggesting that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, treated his dogs better than his men and concluding that, if dogs are to be treated better, they should be put in the aristocracy and go to heaven. The Liberal, though one of the highest quality periodicals of the early 19th century, did not last long. While the first issue sold a very encouraging four thousand copies, a tremendous sale for the time, the second number lost money because of higher costs and smaller sales, and the third and fourth numbers barely covered costs. Also, Byron's interests soon shifted to Greece, where he went in 1823 to help fight Turkey (and to die in 1824), leaving Hunt and his family stranded in Italy with little means of support.

Hunt was unable to return to England until September 1825, when publisher Henry Colburn sent him a sufficient advance on a work to be written about Byron to cover expenses. Shortly after his return he published another narrative poem, the rollicking Bacchus in Tuscany (1825), translated from the Italian of Francesco Redi. The work which provided the means for him to return to England, Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries, was not published until 1828. It aroused a considerable stir because of Hunt's less-than-flattering statements about Byron, saying that he was, among other things, ill-tempered, ill-educated, superstitious, ungenerous, and lacking in taste. The public's general reaction was adverse, accusing Hunt of distorting the picture of Byron out of pure opportunism. His comments about Byron years later in his Autobiography (1850) were considerably more tolerant.

The 1830s were most difficult for Hunt. His influential days as editor of The Examiner were past as were his heady days with the great Romantic poets, and his reputation was at its lowest ebb. He lived through the decade in poverty and poor health. During the decade Hunt was forced by his debts to write constantly. In 1830 he started a new journal, The Chat of the Week, which shortly metamorphosed into The Tatler when the post office required too much postage because of its shape. The Tatler, which was devoted to literature and the stage, was something of a tour de force. For the 17 months of its existence Hunt wrote almost every word of the daily four folio pages. In 1832 he published two distinctive prose works. The first was a distillation of his religious philosophy in a book of exercises and meditations titled Christianism: or, Belief and Unbelief Reconciled, which was revised and enlarged in 1853 as The Religion of the Heart. The second was his sole novel, Sir Ralph Esher, a fictitious autobiography of a nobleman in the time of Charles II, which went through three editions in four years. He also edited two more journals: Leigh Hunt's London Journal (1834-1835), which was one of his best and most successful, and The Monthly Repository (1837-1838). The decade was not all work, however. He befriended Thomas Carlyle, whose wife was the inspiration for Hunt's often-anthologized, simple, and charming rondeau, "Jenny Kiss’d Me" (first published in the Monthly Chronicle, November 1838):

In 1835 Hunt published the intensely antiwar poem Captain Sword and Captain Pen. Notable primarily for its vivid descriptions of the horrors of war, the poem consists of six descriptive sections beginning with Captain Sword and his army marching to battle, the battle, a victory ball, the battlefield at night, the loss of Sword's reason and the rise of Captain Pen, and, finally, the nonviolent combat of Pen leading to a Romantic apocalypse. The 1830s also saw the publication of one of his best-remembered poems, "The Glove and the Lions," (May 1836) first published in the New Monthly Magazine. In it, a lady, as a love test, drops her glove among lions for her lover to retrieve; he does so and throws it in her face. Perhaps Hunt's own favorite, "Abou Ben Adhem," first published in S. C. Hall's Book of Gems (1838), is a simple poem bearing the theme that to love man is the same as to love God. It also includes the line used as Hunt's epitaph: "Write me as one who loves his fellow men." In the July 1837 issue of the Monthly Repository Hunt published a kind of companion poem to The Feast of the Poets, "Blue Stocking Revels," a criticism of many contemporary women writers.

The 1840s began on an exultant note for Hunt with the successful production of his poetic drama A Legend of Florence at the Covent Garden theater. The decade also saw publication Hunt’s long poem, The Palfrey: A Love Story of Old Times, published in 1842. In this nine-hundred-line poem Hunt transforms a medieval French fabliau into a sunny romantic world full of animal spirits and warm humor, as two old men, Sir Guy and Sir Grey, plot the marriage of Sir Grey to Sir Guy's daughter. During this time, he also edited two anthologies of poetry: Imagination and Fancy (1844), a collection of his favorite poems with a critical essay on his philosophy of poetry, and Wit and Humour (1846), a selection from English poets with critical comments. His remaining publications of the decade were prose works though he also edited one last journal, the weekly Leigh Hunt's Journal (December 1850-March 1851). Toward the end of the decade Hunt finally became somewhat more secure financially. In 1844 he had begun receiving a £120 annuity promised by Shelley before he died but delayed until the death of Shelley's father. To this was added in 1847 a Civil List Pension of £200 annually from the government for his services to literature.

By the last decade of his life, Hunt's literary activities and reputation had changed. He was no longer the vigorous reformer of The Examiner but a gentle essayist, poet, and critic. His reputation in the United States was at its height, as evidenced by the several editions of his works published there during the 1850s and the visits paid to him by American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The 1850s were also a time of grief: In 1852 Hunt's youngest son, Vincent, died of tuberculosis; Charles Dickens, though a friend of Hunt's, satirized him as Skimpole in Bleak House (1853); and his wife died in 1857.

His final decade saw the publication of Hunt's Autobiography (1850), perhaps his best work and arguably the best autobiography of the century. It concentrates on the early years, using as a basis the material from Lord Byron and Some of His Contemporaries. The Autobiography is filled with portraits of the famous and the ordinary, and Hunt comes through as cheerful, optimistic, generous, and impulsive. Tolerance and lack of rancor are typical of the book, and especially notable are the mild comments where one might have expected sharper criticism, on the Prince Regent, Byron, Dickens, and old enemies. On the whole the work is vivacious, graceful, and interesting, and marked throughout by Hunt's modesty. In 1855 Hunt wrote and published one last volume, Stories in Verse, and edited selections from the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. In 1858 his second poetic drama, the comedy Lovers' Amazements, was produced. It was received warmly, reviewed handsomely, and bid fair to become popular, but, at the moment of triumph, the manager, Charles Dillon, went bankrupt, and the play and theater closed together. Hunt continued his literary activity to the end, publishing poems and essays in Dickens's journal Household Words, The Musical Times, Fraser's Magazine, and the Spectator. He died on August 28, 1859 while visiting a friend in the country.

Robert Frost - The Road Not Taken (with Commentary, Analysis, and Bio)

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

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BY ROBERT FROST

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

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Commentary by Anon

"The Road Not Taken" is one of Frost's most popular works. Yet, it is a frequently misunderstood poem, often read simply as a poem that champions the idea of "following your own path". Actually, it expresses some irony regarding such an idea. A critique in the Paris Review by David Orr described the misunderstanding this way:

"The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling", at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled … yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable."

Frost wrote the poem as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who was often indecisive about which route to take when the two went walking.

A New York Times book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography Fall of Frost states: "Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something good on the other path." Regarding the "sigh" that is mentioned in the last stanza, it may be seen as an expression of regret or of satisfaction. However, there is significance in the difference between what the speaker has just said of the two roads, and what he will say in the future. According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to his audience, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky", perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities.

Thompson suggests that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected." Thompson also says that when introducing the poem in readings, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Thomas. In Frost's words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."

 

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A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost (Leather-bound Classics) Leather Bound – October 8, 2019

by Robert Frost (Author), Ken Mondschein (Introduction)

The early works of beloved poet Robert Frost, collected in one volume.

The poetry of Robert Frost is praised for its realistic depiction of rural life in New England during the early twentieth century, as well as for its examination of social and philosophical issues. Through the use of American idiom and free verse, Frost produced many enduring poems that remain popular with modern readers. A Collection of Poems by Robert Frost contains all the poems from his first four published collections: A Boy’s Will (1913), North of Boston (1914), Mountain Interval (1916), and New Hampshire (1923), including classics such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Fire and Ice,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” This handsome leather-bound volume is an elegant addition to every poetry lover’s shelf.

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Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

POEM GUIDE

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

Our choices are made clear in hindsight

by Katherine Robinson

Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other—even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. 

“The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could 

To where it bent in the undergrowth … 

In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail—the yellow leaves—and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”—full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. One forest has replaced another, just as—in the poem—one choice will supplant another. The yellow leaves also evoke a sense of transience; one season will soon give way to another. 

The speaker briefly imagines staving off choice, wishing he could “travel both / And be one traveler.” (A fastidious editor might flag the repetition of travel/traveler here, but it underscores the fantasy of unity—traveling two paths at once without dividing or changing the self.) The syntax of the first stanza also mirrors this desire for simultaneity: three of the five lines begin with the word and. 

After peering down one road as far as he can see, the speaker chooses to take the other one, which he describes as 

                                      … just as fair, 

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same. 

Later in the poem, the speaker calls the road he chose “less traveled,” and it does initially strike him as slightly grassier, slightly less trafficked. As soon as he makes this claim, however, he doubles back, erasing the distinction even as he makes it: “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” 

Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable, observing—this time—that the roads are equally untraveled, carpeted in newly fallen yellow leaves: 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black. 

The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions. 

Having made his choice, the speaker declares, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” The diction up until now has been matter-of-fact, focusing on straightforward descriptions and avoiding figurative language. This line initiates a change: as the speaker shifts from depiction to contemplation, the language becomes more stilted, dramatic, and old-fashioned. This tonal shift subtly illustrates the idea that the concept of choice is, itself, a kind of artifice. 

Thus far, the entire poem has been one sentence. The meandering syntax of this long sentence—which sprawls across stanzas, doubling back on itself, revising its meaning, and delaying the finality of decisiveness—mirrors the speaker’s thought process as he deliberates. The neatness of how the sentence structure suddenly converges with the line structure (this sentence is exactly one line) echoes the sudden, clean division that choice creates. 

As the tone becomes increasingly dramatic, it also turns playful and whimsical. “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” sounds like something sighed in a parlor drama, comic partly because it is more dramatic than the occasion merits: after all, the choice at hand is not terribly important. Whichever road he chooses, the speaker, will, presumably, enjoy a walk filled with pleasant fall foliage. 

The poem’s tone also turns increasingly eerie, elusive, and difficult to grasp. As he does throughout the poem, the speaker makes a confident statement (“I saved the first for another day!”) only to turn back and revise it: 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 

I doubted if I should ever come back. 

Already, the speaker doubts he’ll ever return. Writing, as he was, for his friend Edward Thomas, Frost was perhaps thinking of one of Thomas’s most famous poems, “Roads.” Thomas, who was Welsh, lived in a country where roads built by the Romans two millennia previously were (and are) still in use. Some, now paved over, are used as highways, remnants of a culture that has long since vanished and been supplanted by another. In “Roads,” Thomas writes,    

Roads go on 

While we forget, and are 

Forgotten like a star

That shoots and is gone. 

Later he imagines roads when people are absent: 

They are lonely 

While we sleep, lonelier 

For lack of the traveller  

Who is now a dream only. 

“The Road Not Taken” appears as a preface to Frost’s Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Thomas’s “Roads” evokes the legions of men who will return to the roads they left only as imagined ghosts: 

Now all roads lead to France

And heavy is the tread

Of the living; but the dead 

Returning lightly dance. 

Frost wrote this poem at a time when many men doubted they would ever go back to what they had left. Indeed, shortly after receiving this poem in a letter, Edward Thomas's Army regiment was sent to Arras, France, where he was killed two months later. 

When Frost sent the poem to Thomas, Thomas initially failed to realize that the poem was (mockingly) about him. Instead, he believed it was a serious reflection on the need for decisive action. (He would not be alone in that assessment.) 

Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back, insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was “a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing.” The joke rankled; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weakness—his indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas presciently warned Frost that most readers would not understand the poem’s playfulness and wrote, “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.” Edward Thomas was right, and the critic David Orr has hailed “The Road Not Taken” as a poem that “at least in its first few decades … came close to being reader-proof.” 

The last stanza—stripped of the poem’s earlier insistence that the roads are “really about the same”—has been hailed as a clarion call to venture off the beaten path and blaze a new trail. Frost’s lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emerson’s claim that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” In the film Dead Poets Society, the iconoclastic teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, takes his students into a courtyard, instructs them to stroll around, and then observes how their individual gaits quickly subside into conformity. He passionately tells them, “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’” 

Far from being an ode to the glories of individualism, however, the last stanza is a riddling, ironic meditation on how we turn bewilderment and impulsiveness into a narrative: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. 

Again, the language is stylized, archaic, and reminiscent of fairytales. Frost claims he will be telling the story “somewhere ages and ages hence,” a reversal of the fairytale beginning, “Long, long ago in a faraway land.” Through its progression, the poem suggests that our power to shape events comes not from choices made in the material world—in an autumn stand of birches—but from the mind’s ability to mold the past into a particular story. The roads were about the same, and the speaker’s decision was based on a vague impulse. The act of assigning meanings—more than the inherent significance of events themselves—defines our experience of the past. 

The fairytale-like language also accentuates the way the poem slowly launches into a conjuring trick. Frost liked to warn listeners (and readers) that “you have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.” Part of its trick is that it enacts what it has previously claimed is impossible: the traveling of two roads at once. 

The poem’s ending refuses to convey a particular emotional meaning; it playfully evades categorizations even as it describes divisions created by choices. Its triumph is that it does travel two emotional trajectories while cohering as a single statement. We cannot tell, ultimately, whether the speaker is pleased with his choice; a sigh can be either contented or regretful. The speaker claims that his decision has made “all the difference,” but the word difference itself conveys no sense of whether this choice made the speaker’s life better or worse—he could, perhaps, be envisioning an alternate version of life, one full of the imagined pleasures the other road would have offered. 

Indeed, when Frost and Thomas went walking together, Thomas would often choose one fork in the road because he was convinced it would lead them to something, perhaps a patch of rare wild flowers or a particular bird’s nest. When the road failed to yield the hoped-for rarities, Thomas would rue his choice, convinced the other road would have doubtless led to something better. In a letter, Frost goaded Thomas, saying, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.” 

And, indeed, the title of the poem hovers over it like a ghost: “The Road Not Taken.” According to the title, this poem is about absence. It is about what the poem never mentions: the choice the speaker did not make, which still haunts him. Again, however, Frost refuses to allow the title to have a single meaning: “The Road Not Taken” also evokes “the road less traveled,” the road most people did not take. 

The poem moves from a fantasy of staving off choice to a statement of division. The reader cannot discern whether the “difference” evoked in the last line is glorious or disappointing—or neither. What is clear is that the act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity.  All the “difference” that has arisen—the loss of unity—has come from the simple fact that choice is always and inescapably inevitable. The repetition of I—as well as heightening the rhetorical drama—mirrors this idea of division. The self has been split. At the same time, the repetition of I recalls the idea of traveling two roads as one traveler: one I stands on each side of the line break—on each side of the verse’s turn—just as earlier when the speaker imagined being a single traveler walking down both roads at once. 

The poem also wryly undercuts the idea that division is inevitable: the language of the last stanza evokes two simultaneous emotional stances. The poem suggests that—through language and artifice—we can “trick” our way out of abiding by the law that all decisions create differences. We can be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two meanings. In a letter, Frost claimed, “My poems … are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.” The meaning of this poem has certainly tripped up many readers—from Edward Thomas to the iconic English teacher in Dead Poets Society. But the poem does not trip readers simply to tease them—instead it aims to launch them into the boundless, to launch them past spurious distinctions and into a vision of unbounded simultaneity. 

Katherine Robinson earned a BA from Amherst College, an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, The Common and elsewhere. Her critical interests include the influence of mythology and bardic poetry on contemporary...

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Biography of Robert Frost, Poet

by Poetry Foundation

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 following his father’s death. The move was actually a return, for Frost’s ancestors were originally New Englanders, and Frost became famous for his poetry’s engagement with New England locales, identities, and themes. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School, in 1892, as class poet (he also shared the honor of co-valedictorian with his wife-to-be Elinor White), and two years later, the New York Independent accepted his poem entitled “My Butterfly,” launching his status as a professional poet with a check for $15.00. Frost's first book was published around the age of 40, but he would go on to win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and become the most famous poet of his time, before his death at the age of 88.

 

To celebrate his first publication, Frost had a book of six poems privately printed; two copies of Twilight were made—one for himself and one for his fiancee. Over the next eight years, however, he succeeded in having only 13 more poems published. During this time, Frost sporadically attended Dartmouth and Harvard and earned a living teaching school and, later, working a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But in 1912, discouraged by American magazines’ constant rejection of his work, he took his family to England, where he found more professional success. Continuing to write about New England, he had two books published, A Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), which established his reputation so that his return to the United States in 1915 was as a celebrated literary figure. Holt put out an American edition of North of Boston in 1915, and periodicals that had once scorned his work now sought it. 

 

Frost’s position in American letters was cemented with the publication of North of Boston, and in the years before his death he came to be considered the unofficial poet laureate of the United States. On his 75th birthday, the US Senate passed a resolution in his honor which said, “His poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men.” In 1955, the State of Vermont named a mountain after him in Ripton, the town of his legal residence; and at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost was given the unprecedented honor of being asked to read a poem. Frost wrote a poem called “Dedication” for the occasion, but could not read it given the day’s harsh sunlight. He instead recited “The Gift Outright,” which Kennedy had originally asked him to read, with a revised, more forward-looking, last line.

 

Though Frost allied himself with no literary school or movement, the imagists helped at the start to promote his American reputation. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published his work before others began to clamor for it. It also published a review by Ezra Pound of the British edition of A Boy’s Will, which Pound said “has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it has just this utter sincerity. It is not post-Miltonic or post-Swinburnian or post Kiplonian. This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it.” Amy Lowell reviewed North of Boston in the New Republic, and she, too, sang Frost’s praises: “He writes in classic metres in a way to set the teeth of all the poets of the older schools on edge; and he writes in classic metres, and uses inversions and cliches whenever he pleases, those devices so abhorred by the newest generation. He goes his own way, regardless of anyone else’s rules, and the result is a book of unusual power and sincerity.” In these first two volumes, Frost introduced not only his affection for New England themes and his unique blend of traditional meters and colloquialism, but also his use of dramatic monologues and dialogues. “Mending Wall,” the leading poem in North of Boston, describes the friendly argument between the speaker and his neighbor as they walk along their common wall replacing fallen stones; their differing attitudes toward “boundaries” offer symbolic significance typical of the poems in these early collections. 

 

Mountain Interval marked Frost’s turn to another kind of poem, a brief meditation sparked by an object, person or event. Like the monologues and dialogues, these short pieces have a dramatic quality. “Birches,” discussed above, is an example, as is “The Road Not Taken,” in which a fork in a woodland path transcends the specific. The distinction of this volume, the Boston Transcript said, “is that Mr. Frost takes the lyricism of A Boy’s Will and plays a deeper music and gives a more intricate variety of experience.” 

 

Several new qualities emerged in Frost’s work with the appearance of New Hampshire (1923), particularly a new self-consciousness and willingness to speak of himself and his art. The volume, for which Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize, “pretends to be nothing but a long poem with notes and grace notes,” as Louis Untermeyer described it. The title poem, approximately fourteen pages long, is a “rambling tribute” to Frost’s favorite state and “is starred and dotted with scientific numerals in the manner of the most profound treatise.” Thus, a footnote at the end of a line of poetry will refer the reader to another poem seemingly inserted to merely reinforce the text of “New Hampshire.” Some of these poems are in the form of epigrams, which appear for the first time in Frost’s work. “Fire and Ice,” for example, one of the better known epigrams, speculates on the means by which the world will end. Frost’s most famous and, according to J. McBride Dabbs, most perfect lyric, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is also included in this collection; conveying “the insistent whisper of death at the heart of life,” the poem portrays a speaker who stops his sleigh in the midst of a snowy woods only to be called from the inviting gloom by the recollection of practical duties. Frost himself said of this poem that it is the kind he’d like to print on one page followed with “forty pages of footnotes.” 

West-Running Brook (1928), Frost’s fifth book of poems, is divided into six sections, one of which is taken up entirely by the title poem. This poem refers to a brook which perversely flows west instead of east to the Atlantic like all other brooks. A comparison is set up between the brook and the poem’s speaker who trusts himself to go by “contraries”; further rebellious elements exemplified by the brook give expression to an eccentric individualism, Frost’s stoic theme of resistance and self-realization. Reviewing the collection in the New York Herald Tribune, Babette Deutsch wrote: “The courage that is bred by a dark sense of Fate, the tenderness that broods over mankind in all its blindness and absurdity, the vision that comes to rest as fully on kitchen smoke and lapsing snow as on mountains and stars—these are his, and in his seemingly casual poetry, he quietly makes them ours.” 

 

A Further Range (1936), which earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled “Taken Doubly” and “Taken Singly.” In the first, and more interesting, of these groups, the poems are somewhat didactic, though there are humorous and satiric pieces as well. Included here is “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which opens with the story of two itinerant lumbermen who offer to cut the speaker’s wood for pay; the poem then develops into a sermon on the relationship between work and play, vocation and avocation, preaching the necessity to unite them. Of the entire volume, William Rose Benét wrote, “It is better worth reading than nine-tenths of the books that will come your way this year. In a time when all kinds of insanity are assailing the nations it is good to listen to this quiet humor, even about a hen, a hornet, or Square Matthew. ... And if anybody should ask me why I still believe in my land, I have only to put this book in his hand and answer, ‘Well-here is a man of my country.’” Most critics acknowledge that Frost’s poetry in the 1940s and '50s grew more and more abstract, cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the basis of his earlier work that he is judged. His politics and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and local color, became more and more the guiding principles of his work. He had been, as Randall Jarrell points out, “a very odd and very radical radical when young” yet became “sometimes callously and unimaginatively conservative” in his old age. He had become a public figure, and in the years before his death, much of his poetry was written from this stance. 

 

Reviewing A Witness Tree (1942) in Books, Wilbert Snow noted a few poems “which have a right to stand with the best things he has written”: “Come In,” “The Silken Tent,” and “Carpe Diem” especially. Yet Snow went on: “Some of the poems here are little more than rhymed fancies; others lack the bullet-like unity of structure to be found in North of Boston.” On the other hand, Stephen Vincent Benet felt that Frost had “never written any better poems than some of those in this book.” Similarly, critics were let down by In the Clearing (1962). One wrote, “Although this reviewer considers Robert Frost to be the foremost contemporary U.S. poet, he regretfully must state that most of the poems in this new volume are disappointing. ... [They] often are closer to jingles than to the memorable poetry we associate with his name.” Another maintained that “the bulk of the book consists of poems of ‘philosophic talk.’ Whether you like them or not depends mostly on whether you share the ‘philosophy.’” 

 

Indeed, many readers do share Frost’s philosophy, and still others who do not nevertheless continue to find delight and significance in his large body of poetry. In October, 1963, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in Amherst, Massachusetts. “In honoring Robert Frost,” the President said, “we therefore can pay honor to the deepest source of our national strength. That strength takes many forms and the most obvious forms are not always the most significant. ... Our national strength matters; but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.” The poet would probably have been pleased by such recognition, for he had said once, in an interview with Harvey Breit: “One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking poetry as the first form of understanding. If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world, then it isn’t worth anything.” 

 

Frost’s poetry is revered to this day. When a previously unknown poem by Frost titled “War Thoughts at Home,” was discovered and dated to 1918, it was subsequently published in the Fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. The first edition Frost’s Notebooks were published in 2009, and thousands of errors were corrected in the paperback edition years later. A critical edition of his Collected Prose was published in 2010 to broad critical acclaim. A multi-volume series of his Collected Letters is now in production, with the first volume appearing in 2014 and the second in 2016.

Robert Frost continues to hold a unique and almost isolated position in American letters. “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger and William Van O’Connor point out in Poems for Study, “Frost’s poetry, unlike that of such contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the poetic practices of the nineteenth century.” Although he avoids traditional verse forms and only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental. 

 

Frost’s theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-century Romantic poets, he maintained that a poem is “never a put-up job. ... It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.” Yet, “working out his own version of the ‘impersonal’ view of art,” as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T.S. Eliot’s idea that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry: “The objective idea is all I ever cared about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. ... To be too subjective with what an artist has managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.” 

 

To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up 19th-century tools and made them new. Lawrance Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, “the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content” work to a poet’s advantage; they liberate him from the experimentalist’s burden—the perpetual search for new forms and alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in “The Constant Symbol,” wrote his verse regular; he never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as so many of his contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that “the freshness of a poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse in turn might be set to music.” He believed, rather, that the poem’s particular mood dictated or determined the poet’s “first commitment to metre and length of line.” 

 

Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters faulted Frost for his “endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation.” But what Frost achieved in his poetry was much more complex than a mere imitation of the New England farmer idiom. He wanted to restore to literature the “sentence sounds that underlie the words,” the “vocal gesture” that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet’s ear must be sensitive to the voice in order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. “The Death of the Hired Man,” for instance, consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the prosaic patterns of their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound “The Death of the Hired Man” represented Frost at his best—when he “dared to write ... in the natural speech of New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the ‘natural’ speech of the newspapers, and of many professors.” 

 

Frost’s use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism. Within New England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire, which he called “one of the two best states in the Union,” the other being Vermont. In an essay entitled “Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation,” W.G. O’Donnell noted how from the start, in A Boy’s Will, “Frost had already decided to give his writing a local habitation and a New England name, to root his art in the soil that he had worked with his own hands.” Reviewing North of Boston in the New Republic, Amy Lowell wrote, “Not only is his work New England in subject, it is so in technique. ... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary.” Many other critics have lauded Frost’s ability to realistically evoke the New England landscape; they point out that one can visualize an orchard in “After Apple-Picking” or imagine spring in a farmyard in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” In this “ability to portray the local truth in nature,” O’Donnell claims, Frost has no peer. The same ability prompted Pound to declare, “I know more of farm life than I did before I had read his poems. That means I know more of ‘Life.’” 

 

Frost’s regionalism, critics remark, is in his realism, not in politics; he creates no picture of regional unity or sense of community. In The Continuity of American Poetry, Roy Harvey Pearce describes Frost’s protagonists as individuals who are constantly forced to confront their individualism as such and to reject the modern world in order to retain their identity. Frost’s use of nature is not only similar but closely tied to this regionalism. He stays as clear of religion and mysticism as he does of politics. What he finds in nature is sensuous pleasure; he is also sensitive to the earth’s fertility and to man’s relationship to the soil. To critic M.L. Rosenthal, Frost’s pastoral quality, his “lyrical and realistic repossession of the rural and ‘natural,’” is the staple of his reputation. 

 

Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one man and another, so he is also always aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and man. Marion Montgomery has explained, “His attitude toward nature is one of armed and amicable truce and mutual respect interspersed with crossings of the boundaries” between individual man and natural forces. Below the surface of Frost’s poems are dreadful implications, what Rosenthal calls his “shocked sense of the helpless cruelty of things.” This natural cruelty is at work in “Design” and in “Once by the Pacific.” The ominous tone of these two poems prompted Rosenthal’s further comment: “At his most powerful Frost is as staggered by ‘the horror’ as Eliot and approaches the hysterical edge of sensibility in a comparable way. ... His is still the modern mind in search of its own meaning.” 

 

The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost’s poems is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this Frost’s ability “to find the ordinary a matrix for the extraordinary.” In this respect, he is often compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a simple fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery or significance. The poem “Birches” is an example: it contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground temporarily by a boy’s swinging on them or permanently by an ice-storm. But as the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child’s play and natural phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge. 

 

Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frost’s poems, and in “Education by Poetry” he explained: “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. ... Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere.”