Analyse The Woodpile and compare the language and themes to other Frosts poems.
Analyse The Woodpile and compare the language and themes to other Frosts poems.
Frost writes a lot about the emotion of solitude and being isolated, either physically or mentally, and this poem is no different. The line, “I was just far from home”, is a good example to show how isolated and unhappy the narrator is feeling as home is a place of comfort. Pathetic fallacy is used, as the images in this poem set up a bleak icy day that reflects these emotions, for example, “frozen swamp one grey day”, the adjectives, “frozen” and “gray” emphasise this lonely feeling. Frost also gives the reader the impression of the horizon looking the same, emphasising how lost the narrator is feeling, “Too much alike to mark or name a place by”. There are other poems that resemble the idea of being alone; two examples are Home Burial and The Tuft Of Flowers. Home Burial is, for me, the loneliest poem in this selection, as it says that even though you may be surrounded by people it is possible to feel alone emotionally. In the beginning of the poem The Tuft Of Flowers the narrator is feeling alone physically. However this poem questions whether or not people can ever be truly alone, and, as a contrast to most of Frost’s poems like Home Burial, decides you can’t.
Many parallels can be drawn between Tuft Of Flowers and The Wood Pile, another being nature, in a way, leading the narrator to an object that consequently leads the reader to the meaning of the poem. In The Wood Pile a bird flies down close to the narrator and whilst being distracted by the bird the narrator comes to the foot of a neatly measured woodpile. To show the reader that this concrete image is the most important in this poem, Frost describes it precisely, “and measured four by four by eight”. This Woodpile lets Frost make his point that people get tired of the things they do and consequently forget about them, the reader can see this from the image of the wood decaying, “slow smokeless burning of decay”. Frost also talks about the uselessness of the woodpile if it is left there “leave it there far from a useful fire place”. The words decay and useless mean the same thing as waste and wastefulness, showing that Frost’s meaning is that of humans discard for the things they do. In Tuft Of Flowers, the narrator is in the process of turning some freshly cut grass, so it can be dried and made into hay, when they spot a butterfly, that whilst following it with their eyes sees a beautiful area of flowers that the mower had left for the enjoyment of others. The narrator then realise that even though they and the mower are working separately they are not just working for themselves but for other people, and thus decide that men can never truly be alone, “ ‘Men work together’ I told him from the heart ‘whether they work together or work apart’”. As these two concrete images lead the reader to the meaning of the poem we can see that Frost uses concrete lexis to portray abstract ideas.
