Home Burial

University Degree European Languages, Literature and related subjects

Week2 Friday 22nd September, 2006

English Literature: Poetry

Home Burial

“Home Burial,” a dramatic narrative largely in the form of dialogue, has 116 lines in informal blank verse. The setting is a windowed stairway in a rural home in which an unnamed farmer and his wife, Amy, live. The immediate intent of the title is made clear when the reader learns that the husband has recently buried their first-born child, a boy, in his family graveyard behind the house. The title can also be taken to suggest that the parents so fundamentally disagree about how to mourn that their “home” life is in mortal jeopardy—in danger of being buried. Further, Amy, because of her introspective grieving, risks burying both her marriage and her sanity.

The husband enters the stairway from below and sees her before she sees him, because she is wrapped up in herself. He tardily observes that she has been looking out the stairway window at the graveyard, already containing four of “my people” and “the child’s mound.” She doubts that he ever noticed the graveyard from that window and cries out for him to stop talking. Avoiding his touch, she shrinks past him down the stairs. When he asks why a man cannot speak of his “lost” child, she counters first by saying “Not you!” and then by doubting that any man can. She abruptly announces that she must get some air. He tells her not to take her grief to “someone else this time,” sits so as not to seem domineering, and, calling her “dear,” says he wishes to ask her something. When she replies that he does not know how to ask, he requests her “help,” grows bitter at her silence, and generalizes: Men must give up some manliness when married, and further, two who love should to be able to discuss anything. He wants to be allowed into her grief, which he thinks she is “overdo[ing]…a little,” and hints that their love could produce a child to replace the dead one, whose “memory might be satisfied” by now.

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Her rejoinder that he is “sneering” makes him upbraid and half-threaten her and ask why he cannot talk about “his own” dead child. This provokes her longest speech, briefly interrupted by his comment that he feels so “cursed” that he should laugh. The essence of her complaint is that he does not know how to speak, that she could not even recognize him when he dug the grave so energetically that he made “the gravel leap and leap,” and that his voice then was too “rumbling” when he commented that foggy and rainy weather will rot good birch fences. Concluding that he cannot care, she in turn generalizes: Friends grieve for another’s loss so little that they should not bother “at all,” and when a person “is sick to death” he “is alone, and he dies more alone.” Even when survivors attend a burial they are busy thinking of their own lives and actions. She calls the world evil and adds that she will not have grief this way if she “can change it.”

He mistakenly feels that she has said her say, will stay now, and should close the door. She blurts out that he thinks “the talk is all” and that she must “go—/ Somewhere out of this house.” He demands to know where and vows to “bring you back by force.”

Forms and Devices

“Home Burial” achieves tension first of all through its use of unpretentious wording in blank verse, a poetic form with a tradition going back centuries, to tell a tragic domestic story in a homely locale. More obvious tension results from the fact that Amy and her husband have no meeting of either heads or hearts. He speaks fifty-eight lines, many of which are incomplete, while she speaks forty-five such lines. In contrast to the rhetoric of William Shakespeare’s flowing blank-verse dialogue, Frost’s is full of rushes, interruptions, and pauses. Amy tells her husband to stop talking thus: “Don’t, Don’t, Don’t, Don’t.” Frost called this burst the best part of the poem. The husband puts too much faith in words, saying at one point, “There, you have said it all and you feel better.” In Amy’s reply—“oh, you think the talk is all”—that “oh,” which Frost also said he liked, is more effective than a dozen words.

Much remains unarticulated. Frost never tells readers the husband’s name, what the house looks like inside or out, how long ago the child died, or where Amy plans to go as she leaves. The poem is partly about the ineffectiveness of words. When the husband says that he must laugh because he is cursed, Amy does not even hear him but chooses to quote—and misunderstand—his earlier talk about wet days and birch fences.

Frost freights his sparse words with much meaning, often subtle, sometimes symbolic. When he talks of rotting birch wood, Amy says only that his comment has nothing to do with their child’s body when it was “in the darkened parlour.” The astute reader, however, will connect wood rot with human decomposition. When the husband compares the graveyard to a bedroom in size, he is being harmlessly literal. The reader, however, will think that Amy is recalling with displeasure the bedroom in which their child was conceived. When the husband pleads, “Let me into your grief,” there is another sexual overtone of which he is not conscious. The stairway should be a place where the two might walk together, connecting levels of shared living; instead, it is merely a stage where body language reinforces the poem’s words. Amy silently spies on her husband through the window instead of calling and waving to him. He climbs the stairs until his nearness makes her “cower…under him,” at which he promises not to “come down the stairs.” Frost intends a pun when the husband complains that his words to Amy “are nearly always an offence.” Truly the two are fenced apart, by words and acts.

Amy’s most effective verbal barrage, loaded with l alliteration, is her description of her husband’s fiercely digging the grave with the leaping, leaping gravel “roll(ing) back down the mound beside the hole.” Surely Frost wants the reader to connect this up-and-down motion with sexual activity but also, and more important, with the birth-life-adulthood-love-death cycle of humankind.

Themes and Meanings

Frost’s primary concern in “Home Burial” is to present modes of grief and communication. The Frosts’ first child, a son, died in 1900 at the age of four. Their grief, which permanently wrenched their long marriage, took conflicting forms, during which his wife, unlike the more talkative Frost, bottled up her grief and called the world evil exactly as Amy does. Frost, who gave innumerable public and private readings of his poetry, never included “Home Burial,” explaining that it was too sad.

Amy and her husband are disastrously contrasting spouses. She is masochistic and rebellious. When she says, “I won’t have grief so/ If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!,” she risks losing not only husband but reason itself. He moves coarsely from trying to question her to protesting and threatening. He never explains his sense of loss or his mode of grieving and never tells her that his commonplace talk and actions might represent a flinching from heartbreak. He never says that when he buried their baby he wished she had been standing beside him. Amy too misses a chance to replace discord with harmony, by not helping him frame the question he wants to ask; instead she stifles him by saying that neither he nor “any man” can speak acceptably to her. Never once do they speak of “our” child.

They communicate by body language more expressively than by words. At first she is at the top of the stairs, and he is at the bottom. After they have reversed positions of seeming dominance, he sits—but with his chin in “his fists,” not his hands. When he generalizes about off-limit topics between couples, her only response is to “move…the latch” of the door. Her intention is to get out of the house. It, along with her husband in it, is smothering her. Frost offers two messages in “Home Burial,” one for pessimists such as himself, another for optimists. Its action exposes barriers to communication even among people “wonted” to intimacy. On the other hand, the dreadful aftermath of such barriers should encourage readers of good will to speak from the heart, listen, and be sympathetic.

NB: Notes from enotes.com