In “The Wood-Pile”, the speaker sees a bird, which eventually leads him to the wood-pile. Frost then uses his sense of ambiguity, which he does to most of his poems. In “The Wood-Pile”, the speaker is in effect taking nature (the bird) as personally communicating with him, as if nature were concerned with what decision he makes, go back or keep going on? Perhaps then Frost wanted the reader to convey the decaying wood-pile as the depth of nature’s concern.
The poem sees a man walking through a frozen swamp. He is stuck in a decision of whether to go ahead or not, nature is forcing him to make such a decision, but he decides to continue on and ends up getting lost. Paths in woods are ancient and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, to crises and decisions. The speaker does not know which road to take; neither of the roads is less travelled by. He has to make a decision and at the end of the day, the nature of the decision is that there is no Right path, just a chosen path and the other path as show in “The Road Not Taken”.
“The Wood-Pile” is appealing, but the point Frost is trying to make could be perhaps speaking of human effort and what it comes to or hinting at despair. But the last two lines are warming and carves itself into the poem permanently, perhaps ending the poem with a sense of hope, in that the wood decays, generating heat, which makes it have some uses, even though it has been abandoned and left to rot, yet it is a hopeless task all the same. In “The Wood-Pile”, there was ‘hard snow’, which held the speaker back from going any further, but the speaker persists on, but to only get lost. This leads the speaker to the woodpile to a revelation of human effort, despair and decay, here is an example where Frost uses nature as a barrier in his poems, but in a worthwhile way.
Another example of this is in the poem, “Mending Wall”. We have two men meeting only in terms of civility and neighbourliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of habit and tradition. Yet the earth conspires against them, whether at hands of hunters or the thaw of nature’s invisible hand, makes the boulders tumble down again and making their task ‘Sisyphean’. The poem starts out straightforwardly enough, but then ends in complex ambiguity. “Good fences make good neighbours.” The remark is somewhat said in a sardonic tone.
In “Mending Wall”, Frost brilliantly shows the good consequences of nature making extra work of mankind. The frost and thawing on the wall causes the two neighbours to ‘ come after them and made repair’. What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement can, ironically, be interpreted as a great social gesture. Good fences do make good neighbours. But this task is the only thing that brings the two men together. Rules and laws can be metaphorically said as walls, as they are there to stop or prevent something from happening. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society. We could describe Frost in his nature poems as a mender and breaker of the wall of poetry, in his uses of blank verse, in a sense he did break some traditional boundaries of poetry but broke them and changed them in a way people accepted.
In “After Apple-picking”, Frost deliberately leaves us in ambiguity, with the mystery of the rhymes, as when and how often they come. As there is no set rhyme scheme, this keeps words and sounds active to keep the reader on their toes. The poem could metaphorically suggest that it is about the efforts of writing poetry. The ‘cider-apple heap’ then makes a good metaphor for saved and recycled bits of poetry. The interpretation of ‘sleep’ could be the ‘Final sleep’ as the sleep of Woodchuck is the sleep of winter, which metaphorically, in the language of seasons, has strong associations with death.
In general, nature is described with affection, yet none of the nature poems are free from hints of possible danger. However, Frost, when using nature, in his descriptions, is convincingly real. One can picture the situation; perhaps even feel the ‘warmth’ of the fire in “The Wood-Pile”. Whichever way you see it, it is evident that nature plays an important role in Frost’s poetry and “The Wood-pile” proves this and is a typical example of many of his other poems involving nature, with its blank verse that Frost has created to be his own using his symbolic language to make the poems more speech-like.
