Mahayana Robert Frost (1874-1963) was the leading modern American poet of nature and rural life. He found beauty and meaning in commonplace objects, such as a drooping birch tree and an old stone wall, and drew universal significance from the experiences of a farmer or a country boy. Most of his poems have a New England setting and deal with the theme of man’s relationship to nature. The influence of nature in Robert Frost’s works creates a palette to paint a picture filled with symbolism for the reader to Interpret.
In the analysis of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, Tree At MY Window, Two Trumps In The Mud Time and stopping BY The Woods On A Snowy Evening we can pick out specific examples to illustrate Frost’s overall use of nature. In the first stanza of Robert Frost’s Stopping by the Woods on A Snowy Evening we find the speaker reflecting on the beauty of a wooded area with snow falling. Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is In the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
You can feel the speakers awe and reflective peace when looking Into the woods that eight. He doesn’t know the owner of the land but is still drawn to the beauty of the scene. Nature poet Robert Frost gives a scene that Is taken into the reader and digested for a time in the speaker’s mind. It shows us that it is all right to take a minute out of a hurried hour and reflect upon what is around you, whether It is a snowy wood or a quite room. The extreme fascination and acute love to the nature makes him a great poet of nature, The reader can tell that Frost does love water.
He also Likes the power of It and expressing to through nature. He also brings up other points of nature, but it always has water. The water is always breaking down cliffs, beaches and boulders. Frost’s poems are similar but are also very different, but they all have nature in them. One point of view on which almost all the critics agree Is Robert Frosts minute observation and accurate description of the different aspects of nature in his poems. Schneider says: The descriptive power of Mr.. Frost Is to me the most wonderful thing in his poetry.
A snowfall, a spring thaw, a bending tree, a valley mist, a brook. These are brought Into the experience of the reader. But I have promises to keep, -From Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening These lines depict not only the beauty and the mystery of the snow filled woods which hold the poet almost spell-bound but also describe the helplessness of the poet who has no time because of his social commitments. Thus the beauty of Nature and obligations of human life are treated by Frost as two aspects of poet’s one whole experience in these lines.
Although Frost’s verse is lyrical, he is often considered a dramatic poet. One of his most admired poems, “The Mending Wall”, describes the inflict that arises between the poem’s narrator and his neighbor over rebuilding a wall that separates their farms. The neighbor holds the traditional opinion that “Good fences make good neighbors,” but the narrator believes that walls are unnecessary and unnatural between people who should trust each other. During his lifetime, Frost was the American equivalent of a poet laureate.
In 1950, the United States Senate passed a resolution in honor of his 75th birthday, stating that his poems “have helped to guide American thought with humor and wisdom. ” At the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost read his poem, “The Gift Outright”, about America’s gaining of independence through its devotion to the land. Frost also composed “Dedication”, but he was unable to deliver it. In 1962, President Kennedy presented Frost with the Congressional Medal.
Frost’s own love of the soil, his quiet humor, and his simple but moving language made him one of the most respected poets of his generation. Nature is a dominant subject in the poetry of Robert Frost. In the epitaph that Robert Frost proposed for himself, he said that he had “a lover of quarrel with the world,” his lover’s quarrel is Frost’s poetic subject, and throughout his poetry there are evidences of this view of man’s existence in the natural world. His attitude towards Nature is one of armed and amicable true and mutual respect.
He recognizes and insists upon the boundaries which exist between individual man and the forces of Nature. “There is almost nothing of the mystic in Frost. He does not seek in Nature either a sense of oneness with all created things or union with God. There is nothing Platonic in his view of life, because it is a foreshadowing of something else. ” Robert Frost unlike William Wordsmith sees no pervading spirit in the natural impersonal and unfeeling. Though Nature watches man, she takes no account of him.
Robert Frost treats Nature both as a comfort and menace. As a critic says, “Frost does not formulate a theory of Nature or of man’s relationship with Nature. However, it seems that Frost believes that man should live in harmony with Nature and not go against Nature or natural process. ” Nature possesses a great place in Frost’s poetry. Most of his poems use nature an observation of something in nature and then moves toward a connection to some unman situation or concern.
His treatment of nature is different from other nature poets: he is neither a transcendentalist nor a pantheist. Therefore, his use of nature is the single most misunderstood element of his poetry. Frost himself said over and over, “l am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems. ” (frostiness. Org) The elements and settings of Frost’s poetry are natural. Wisped comments on his setting, “His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century. “(wisped).
The rural scenes and landscapes, homely farmers, and the natural world are used to illustrate a psychological struggle with everyday experience in the context of everyday American life and psychology as well as his personal. Primarily, the names of some of his poems indicate his treatment of nature: “Mowing” “The Tuft of Flowers” “Mending Wall” “Home Burial” “After Apple- Picking” “The Wood-pile” “The Road Not Taken” “Birches” “Fire and Ice” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” , “The Pasture” Many people assume that the speaker in Frosts poems is Frost himself.
But it is actually a brilliant artistic creation, a “persona” or mask which conforms with the landscape of his poems. The editor of North Anthology in his introduction to Frost’s selection states that he worked individual poems into a larger unity by presenting in them a recurrent speaker, a wise country person living close to nature and approaching life in a spirit of compassionate realism. Thus Frost’s depiction of his landscape is very much realistic. The beauty of Nature and obligations of human life are treated by Frost as two aspects of poet’s one whole experience.
In the following lines the poet describes the helplessness of the poet who has no time because of his social commitments, though he has been almost spell-bound by the beauty and the mystery of the snow which has filled woods: The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, [Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening] For this reason, UnicycleГdid Britannica writes about him, He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life [and his command of American colloquial speech. Robert Frost’s poetry is notable for its descriptive power which runs through imagery drawn from natural phenomenon. Schneider says “The secretive power of Mr.. Frost is to me the most wonderful thing in his poetry. A snowfall, a spring thaw, a bending tree, a valley mist, a brook, these are brought into the experience of the reader”. (Quoted in Wagner-Martin, 97) Follow the following images: “And life is too much like a pathless wood” (Birches) “The world of hoary grass” (After Apple Picking) In many of his poems, Frost uses nature as metaphor.
He observes something in nature and says this is like that. He leads you to make a connection, but never forces it on the reader. Frost(1946) himself writes about his use of metaphor, “There are any other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefs of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulterior. Such a metaphoric poem from nature is “After Apple-picking”, about picking apples. But with its ladders pointing “[t]award heaven still,” with its great weariness, and with its rumination on the harvest, the coming of winter, and inhuman sleep, the reader feels certain that the poem harbors some “ulterior. ” Read the following lines from the poem, And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
Actually, the metaphor of the lines has some similarity with our poet Étagère in Sonar Ton, Frost’s active interaction or encounter between a human speaker and a natural subject or phenomenon culminates in profound realizations or revelations have a variety of results, including self-knowledge, deeper understanding of the human condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world. For instance, a day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death, in “After Apple-Picking” (1915). “It’s like his/ Long sleep”
