Fros's peorty is more about people than nature. Discuss

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Stacey Andrews

Frost’s poetry is more about nature than people- Discuss.

Throughout all of this collection of poems, Robert Frost captures the true meaning of human behaviour through his comparisons with nature.  Taking inspiration from his experiences of farming and agriculture, Frost uses parallel’s between the natural order of nature and that of human behaviour.

 Originally he was not recognised in the UK but recognition for his work was a huge success in the USA. Acknowledgment for his work within England however, came much later on in life. He presents an idealistic idyllic view of beauty and contrasts this to the stark harsh reality of everyday life created by people. By doing this, he appreciates that the harshness of everyday life will always remain an essential feature to human nature.

 His poems could be described to be deceptively straightforward as it is through the simplicity of nature that Frost examines the true human nature of people and it is through this, that I shall examine the themes of ‘barriers’, ‘duty versus desire’ and isolation.

Barriers appear to be a recurring theme within this collection of s poems. In general everyday conversation, a barrier can be defined as, anything that separates or holds apart and it is through this concept that Frost takes on this basic assumption of barriers being physical ‘things’ and extends it by looking at barriers in an abstract sense.

For example in his poem, ‘The Road not Taken’, Frost focuses on the barrier of not being able to see the end consequence. It looks into the choices that people make and uses the metaphor of two roads in order to show this. He acknowledges that he is unable to travel down both “I could not travel both”, so is forced to travel one. He chooses to take the one that is less travelled by “I took the one less travelled by” and by doing so decides to seize the day and express himself as an individual, claiming that his life was fundamentally different than it would have been had he chosen the more well travelled path. In this sense, Frost is saying that people can only make a life choice based on the present. One particular barrier people have in life is not being able to see the end consequence and as such, we have to choose what seems right at the time.

 ‘Mending Wall’ also looks at the theme of barriers.  Here, Frost uses the physical barrier of the wall to question whether boundaries are necessary. Frost creates two distinct characters; both have different ideas about what makes a person a good neighbour. The narrator dislikes his neighbour’s preoccupation with repairing the wall, “we do not need a wall.” He views it as old-fashioned and archaic. He retorts that his apples are not going to invade the property of his neighbour’s pinecones “my apple trees will never get across and eat the cones under his pines”.

Moreover, within such a free land, the narrator asks whether such borders are necessary to maintain relationships between people and encourages the reader to think of their own self made barriers and whether these are necessary. Despite the narrator’s sceptical view of the wall, the neighbour maintains his “old-fashioned” mentality, responding to each of the narrator’s questions with nothing more than “good fences make good neighbours”.

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Barriers in ‘Death of a Hired Man’ however, are represented through Warren’s disappointment and anger towards Silas. He struggles to forgive Silas for never fulfilling his obligations and as such makes it hard for Silas to return to work. Mary’s compassionate nature eventually convinces him, but when Warren goes to get Silas, he is already dead. It is through Warren’s failure to forgive, that Silas is forced to die alone.

 According to Mary, Silas is ill “I didn’t recognise him” and believes that he has returned home to die in the companionship of those he knew. Warren creates the barrier ...

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