Ambivalences and Conflicts in Robert

Frost’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper examines Robert Frost’s exploration of the different relationships

confronting mankind: the relationship between man and nature, man and God,
man and other people, man and himself. Such exploration is clearly manifested in
his most famous poems. In the modern society, people are often found to be lost in
various confusions. Starting from the common scene of everyday rural life, Robert
Frost engaged himself in the philosophical thinking of modern life.

Part 1 examines how Robert Frost vacillates in his attitude towards the
relationship between mankind and nature. Part 2 is aimed to find Robert Frost’s
attitude toward God and his ideas about the relationship between man and God.
Part 3 researches his exploration on the relationship between man and the other
people. Part 4 analyses man’s struggle between him and his inner self. The
ambivalences and conflicts manifested in his poems altogether show Robert
Frost’s attitude that life is mixture of darkness as well as brightness.

Keywords: Robert Frost, nature, religion, society

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Thesis statement

In the modern society, people are often found to be lost in various confusions, and
these ambivalences and conflicts are manifested in Robert Frost’s poetry through
his exploration of man’s relationship concerning nature, religion, society and his
inner self.

Outline

1. Relationship between man and nature

1.1. Destructive power of nature
1.2. Selfishness and apathy of man towards nature
1.3. Harmonious coexistence between man and nature

2. Relationship between man and God

2.1. Anxiety and fear about God
2.2. Skeptism about the existence of God

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3. Relationship between man and other people
3.1. Optimism about the mutual understanding between human beings
3.2. Barriers between one and another

4. Relationship between man and his inner self

4.1. Struggles in making a choice
4.2. Desire to escape from reality
4.3. Desire to stop his life of journey
4.4. Desire to retire

Renowned as the New England poet, Robert Frost is well known for his
realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.
His work frequently employed themes from the early 1900s rural life in New
England. He was used to the life in the countryside with the company of nature,
but he was by no means a recluse who escaped from reality. He did pay a lot of
attention to the natural environments, but he never stopped his thinking of
temporal life and human society. His poems seemed to be simple and plain, but
just as Robert Faggen says: “Frost reaches out but also holds back from and
subverts his readers’ expectations of sincerity and simplicity” (1). These poems
embodied philosophical thinking which reflected Robert Frost’s meditation and
exploration of modern human life. As is manifested in his most famous poems, he
mainly explores the relationships between human beings, between man and
nature, between man and God, between man and his inner self.

1 Relationship between man and nature

Living in the countryside for the major part of his life, Robert Frost was
closely connected with nature, and therefore, a main aspect of his exploration was
on the relationship between human beings and nature.

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 In “Storm Fear”, the poet described the storm as a “beast” that beat against the
window, shouting and luring the speaker to “come out” into the trap of death. The
narrator refused the “invitation” decisively, but he realized that they only got the
strength of two adults and a child while the power of the storm had no sign of
abating. As a result, fear and suspicion arose in him: “And my heart owns a
doubt / Whether ’tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided” (16-
18)1. He began to wonder whether they were able to resist the storm until the next
morning and to keep themselves safe. In this poem, the storm represented nature
while the narrator’s family stood for the human beings. By describing the
mysterious, furious, aggressive nature which made mankind feel helpless and
frightened, Robert Frost spoke out his consideration that nature was sometimes
distant from human beings, treating them apathetically and cruelly. Mankind
never had the capability to conquer the powerful nature or even resist it.
Meanwhile, the poet thought human beings were selfish, cool-hearted and
even threatening in their relation with nature. In “An Old Man’s Winter Night”,
Robert Frost described a lonely picture in which an exhausted old man kept
pacing back and forth in the cold room. He could not divert himself from the
overriding loneliness and boredom. What he could do was to go to bed, just like
going to his tomb. The old man could not find any consolation from nature, nor
can he contribute something to it. As was depicted in the poem, he was just a lamp
which could only lighten himself, or even less than a lamp. “One aged man—one
man—can’t fill a house / A farm, a countryside, or if he can / It’s thus he does it of
a winter night” (26-28). He could do nothing to help himself, not to mention
nature. His existence and activities might even damage nature to some extent:

1
Quotations from Robert Frost's poems are taken from Complete Poems, Prose and Plays of
Robert Frost. New York: Library of America , 1995 and will hereafter be referenced by line
number only.
.

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 He stood with barrels round him—at a loss

And having scared the cellar under him

In clomping there, he scared it once again

In clomping off;—and scared the outer night

Here the old man, as a representative of human beings, is indifferent and

unconcerned about nature, while nature doubles his loneliness. Mankind and
nature are isolated, being unable to coexist, to mutually understand and give
comfort to each other.
In the two poems discussed above, Robert Frost found that nature was
alienated from or even against human beings, which made the relationship
between them as strangers or even enemies.
However, Robert Frost did not always regard this kind of relationship was
hostile, for he also depicted a harmonious coexistence between the two. Take the
poem “To the Thawing Wind” as an example, the narrator desired for the coming
of the thawing wind.
Come with rain. O loud Southwester!

Bring the singer, bring the nester;

Give the buried flower a dream;

Make the settled snow bank steam; (2-5)

He not only hoped the wind could bring life back to everything on the earth, but
also invited it to his own room to appreciate his pictures on the wall and to thumb
through his poems. Last but not least, he was eager to be brought out of the room
by the wind, into the wild nature. Robert Frost here built a kind of friendship
between the narrator and the thawing wind, who together experienced life and
shared the joy of it. Entirely different from “Storm Fear”, human beings and

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nature were put in the harmonious and friendly relations in this poem. By way of
expressing the narrator’s eagerness for the wind, the poet showed his own love for
nature as well as the good wish for the joyful and peaceful coexistence of
mankind and nature.
From the above illustrations, we can see that in Frost’s eyes, nature is
sometimes lovely and attractive, and sometimes seemingly stands against human
beings. Just like Roberts W. French says in “Robert Frost and the Darkness of
Nature”, “if Frost’s poem insists on anything […], it insists on the impenetrable
barriers between man and nature; we live in a world that we cannot know, for it
will not reveal itself; and yet we yearn for some sort of communication” (155).

2 Relationship between man and God

Since nature is always closely linked to God, and the relationship between
man and God is always a pervasive topic in American literature, Robert Frost also
has his own exploration on this relationship. From his Puritan forebears, he had
inherited the specter of an inscrutable deity who demands unremitting obedience.
Frost called himself an "Old Testament Christian" (Meyers 281). Though he might
joke about God, his anxiety was real. According to Peter Stanlis, a Frost specialist,
the poet believed that “because of the uncertainty of God’s ultimate justice or
mercy, man is compelled ‘to stay afraid’ deep in his soul (qtd. in Sloan, par. 8). In
the poem “Once by the Pacific”, Robert Frost described a horrifying scene by the
Pacific in which the clouds, the wind and the waves are frenzied, as if they were
going to destroy the whole world. In Frost’s eyes, the gathering storm which
presaged a universal holocaust was orchestrated by an angry Almighty: “Someone
had better be prepared for rage. / There would be more than ocean-water broken /
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken” (12-14). His fear of God is fully
manifested in this poem, afraid that the angry God will one day destroy everything

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in the world.
In spite of the old Testament Christian, Frost was often unsure—or not sure
enough. “His letters are sprinkled with declarations of unbelief. He was ‘an old
dissenter,’ ‘a semi-detached villain,’ ‘secular till the last go down.’ There were ‘no
vampires, no ghouls, no demons, nothing but me’ ” (Sloan, par.18). Such skeptism
is displayed in some of his poems. In the poem “For. Once. Then. Something”,
Robert Frost explores the questions whether truth exists and whether it can be
obtained. The narrator sought truth by virtue of looking down into the bottom of a
well. He really saw something white, but then one drop fell from a fern which
shook and blurred everything, making the once clear white thing difficult to
identify and to recognize, and therefore he could not see what was really in the
well. Here the white thing, which the speaker was quite uncertain of at first and
then completely lost sight of, was truth. The narrator said
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture (1-4)

The “others” were religious people who mocked at the narrator for his peculiar
behavior because they believed truth could be achieved if they worshipped and
communicated with God in a proper manner, but the speaker was quite skeptical
of that. He did not even believe there was truth, and if it did exist like the
whiteness, the truth was by no means absolute because it could only be reached by
chance or in a glimpse; it would slip away just after something as tiny as a water
drop fell. In Robert Frost’s eyes, there was no absolute truth or any kind of truth
that can be easily commanded, and most of the things were in ambiguity and
beyond control. This poem indicated not only the poet’s pessimistic attitude

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toward the theme of truth, but also his suspicion of the existence of God. He
showed his different standpoints from the religious people and his frailness in
trusting God.
In a letter “To Lawrance Thompson”, Robert Frost wrote like this. “You
seem to reason that because my mother was religious, I must have been religious
too at any rate to start with. You might just as well reason that because my father
was irreligious I must have been irreligious too […]. It would be terribly
dangerous to make too much of me” (Thompson 529). He thought others
shouldn’t conjecture his relationship with God just from the point of family
background, and actually, for most of his life, Frost vacillated between belief and
skepticism, piety and irreverence, submission and rebellion. “He tossed the idea of
God up and down like a ball,” said critic Alfred Kazin (qtd. in Sloan, par. 10). He
could not arrive at a certain conclusion in his exploration of the relationship
between man and God, just like he could not find steady relationship between man
and nature.

2 Relationship between man and other people

As he lived in the society constituted by human beings, it was an

indispensible part in Robert Frost’s poems to explore the relationships between
human beings. Sometimes, Robert Frost thought it was possible to achieve mutual
understanding between one and another. For instance, in “The Tuft of Flowers”,
the narrator went to turn the grass once after somebody who mowed it before the
sunrise, only to find that the mower had already gone with the mown grass lying
there. He therefore felt lonely: “And I must be, as he had been—alone / ‘As all
must be,’ I said within my heart / ‘Whether they work together or apart’ ” (8-10).
But then a butterfly appeared, hovering before the narrator, as if looking for a

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pleasing flower of yesterday. Following the routes of the butterfly, he found a tuft
of flowers that the mower left standing. Although the mower left the flowers not
for him, the narrator felt delighted, for he experienced the same emotion as the
mower, and felt lonely no more.
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

‘Whether they work together or apart.’ (32-42)

In this poem, the butterfly led the narrator in his change of mood. It captured
his attention, leading him to spot the flowers. Consequently, the narrator spotted
the connection and bonds between human beings in the flower, realizing that he
was accompanied by many other people, acquaintances or strangers just like the
mower. The tuft of flower here symbolizes not only the pleasure of life, but also
the understanding and communication between people. It is this tuft of flowers
that made the narrator felt warm and cheerful in such an open wild. Just because
of the flowers, he seemed as if he could feel what the mower was thinking about;
they could have a delightful conversation, and fully understood each other. To be
mutually understood is the highest state in the association of mankind, and Robert

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Frost expressed his optimistic thinking that human beings do have intimate
connections and are able to attain the mutual understanding of one another.
However, Robert Frost is not always an optimistic in this matter. In his
famous poem “Mending Wall”, he continues his exploration on human relations,
but with an obviously opposite attitude. “Mending Wall” mainly talks about the
disagreements between the narrator and his neighbor on whether to mend the wall
between them. A stone wall separated the speaker's property from his neighbor's.
In the spring, the two met to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The neighbor
insisted in building the wall since he believed the old adage “Good fences make
good neighbors”. Although the narrator partly agreed with this idea, he thought
this wall was not necessary at all as the neighbor all planted pine in his yard while
the narrator planted apple trees in his. The speaker envisioned his neighbor as a
holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age
mentality. But the neighbor simply repeated the adage. It was the different living
attitudes held by the speaker and his neighbor that built this wall. In this poem, the
wall symbolizes the fences between different people which may function as
protectors but are more often barriers, physically and mentally. This wall will
alienate people from each other, probably causing misunderstanding and conflicts.
The wall between the two houses will break down as time passes, and it is the
same case with the invisible wall between human beings. However, just like the
neighbors in the poem mending the wall, people keep constructing the barriers.
Although Frost wished the wall between people can be pushed down, he knew
different backgrounds and attitudes will inevitably keep this wall there. He
expressed not only his satire and kind of contempt for the obstinate and ignorant
neighbor, but also his disappointment towards the poor and fragile relationship
between human beings.
Seen from the above poems, Robert Frost sometimes held such a positive

10
attitude towards the human relations that he believes men can break through the
obstacles and obtain bonds and connections between one another; but sometimes
he was so pessimistic about the reality where everyone was a lonely individual
isolated from others by the self-built barriers.

2 Relationship between man and his inner self

No matter it is the relationship between man and nature, man and God, or man
and others, it is the relations mankind has with the outer world. The most
important part in Robert Frost’s exploration of modern life is his meditation on
man’s inner struggle, or in other words, the relationship between human and his
inner self.
In the poem “The Road Not Taken”, a young man took the road less travelled
by when facing two diverged roads in a wood one morning. It was just a very
common issue of choosing a way to go between two choices. It was difficult to
make a choice because there was not much difference as far as he could see. He
finally took seemingly better way, which actually was the more challenging way,
because it was grassy. Although he really wanted to take the other way, and he
wanted to go on the other way another day, he knew he could not come back to
choose again because way leads on to way like different decisions make the
related decisions different. What he could do was to say with a sign years later
that he “took the one less travelled by, [a]nd that has made all the difference” (19-
20). The tinge of regret in so abundantly expressed in the last line, that the readers
can’t help guessing, maybe Robert Frost wanted to choose the first road, but was
compelled to choose the rough one because of responsibilities he had to take for
his families, and some others. To choose a way to go symbolizes to make a choice
in life. Life is full of dilemmas which we have to face and to settle. The choice at

11
present will lead to a completely different future and no one is able to turn round
in the reality. The choice may be far from his will, one has to take up the
responsibilities to travel on and this is life. Robert Frost experienced an inner
struggle as manifested in this poem. As Charles E. Bressler introduces, according
to Freud, “the irrational and unconscious part of the psyche” is called id, “the
rational, working part the ego”, superego “acts like an internal censor, causing us
to make moral judgments in the light of social pressures and the ego’s job is to
meditate between the id and the superego” (89-90). Here the poet vacillated
between his instinct to choose the first road and the kind of outer power like social
pressures. Taking the road less travelled by at last, he knew he couldn’t follow his
own bent or turn around, but he would persist in this road for “ages and ages”.
The poem “Birches” also reveals Robert Frost’s inner conflicts. The poem
opens with the speaker noticing some birch trees which have been bent down to
the ground after an ice-storm. The birches reminded the speaker of his childhood,
and he showed us a picture of a boy swinging the birches as entertainments, which
he himself did as a child. The speaker thought about how he climbed the trees,
how he kept balance, how he conquered all the birches, and how he flung to the
ground. His nostalgic reminiscence of his childhood introduced his being fed up
with the real life:

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood (41-44)

He wanted to go away from the wearisome reality, back to the childhood when he
could swing among trees and fly to heaven by dint of the birches. However, he did
not mean to be away forever, because someday the birches would not bear him no

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more, and there was no better place to go to. As the major image in the poem, the
birches symbolizes the pleasant childhood days, and meanwhile functions as a
tool for the speaker to escape from the pressure in the reality. The complicated
affection Robert Frost has for the temporal life is clearly unveiled in this poem:
the wearisome affairs and various kinds of pressures haunted him, making him
eager to go away from the world for a while, but he knew it was impossible for a
man who should take up responsibilities. The remarks that the world is the best
place for love can be seen as a comfort he made to himself, as he realized that he
should enjoy life if he could not escape. His instinct lured him to go, to flee from
the world and to drop everything behind him, for the reality was quite depressing
while the superego persuaded him to stay, to carry on with his duty, and to take
care of himself and his family, for the social codes didn’t allow him to be a
deserter in the battle of life.
The similar fight between the id and superego is also displayed in Robert
Frost’s another poem “Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening”. In the poem, the
traveler stopped abruptly during his journey on a dark evening in winter without a
farmhouse near, as he was attracted by a lovely wood. On the darkest evening of
the year, the small woods with frozen lake nearby appeared quite mysterious,
seeming to call the speaker to go into it. The picture the poem showed to us was
quite tranquil and peaceful: with easy wind blowing and flakes drifting down, the
only sound in the night was just the bell of the speaker’s little horse. It was quite a
contrast against the chaos and tumult of life. The speaker was so carried away by
this charming wood that he even halted his trip before arriving at the destination.
Even the horse thought his master to be weird in that he stopped at such an
unexpected place. The depiction of the horse’s mentality served as a foil to the
speaker’s obsession in this lovely wood. Meanwhile, the mental activities were the
reflection of the speaker’s own bewilderment: he was also confused at his strange

13
behavior. He just couldn’t help being attracted by the beauty and tranquility of the
wood. Although he was once lured and confused, he finally made up his mind to
carry on his journey, and to continue to play the role in real life. He knew he had
“promises to keep”, and a long way to go before he could stop and sleep. The
word “And miles to go before I sleep” (15-16) is repeated in the last two lines,
which emphasized the speaker’s determination, and also expressed the his
resignation towards life. The change from the desire to retire to the decision to
continue his journey resulted from the combat between the id and the superego.
The id urged him to break off his trip and to retire from the complicated life into
the peaceful nature while the superego persuaded or compelled him to hold on. It
is almost quite the same with the idea in “Birches”. In that poem, the speaker
wanted to go back to be a happy child or to escape from the reality for a while
because of the painful sufferings; in this one, the speaker was attracted by the
peaceful wood and initiated the desire to retire. The ending of them are also alike:
the superego took the upper hand, and the speaker took up his courage to proceed
with the wearisome life.
In the poem “After Apple Picking”, Robert Frost presents a quite different
exploration of his inner self. This is a poem about apple harvest. However, it was
not filled with the pleasure out of harvest as usual, but with imperfection,
dissatisfaction, and exhaustion. After a long day's work, the speaker was tired of
apple picking. Although there was still a barrel to fill and some apples to pick, he
couldn’t help sleeping because he felt drowsy as the result of the apples’ scent and
all day long’s hard labor. As a matter of fact, he felt dreamy since the morning
when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough
and saw a different world. The dream was mixed up with the reality in this poem,
making us unable to distinguish one from the other. In other words, the dream was
actually the reflection of the reality, and the emotions the speaker felt was what he

14
really wanted to express. He felt “overtired” of the great harvest he himself
desired. The reasons why he ignored the pleasure of harvest but could only feel
dissatisfaction are complicated. The long day’s hard work made him so jaded that
he could not stick to the last point when all the apples were picked and all the
barrels were filled. This consequently brought the feeling of dissatisfaction. At the
same time, he felt mentally exhausted because he had to care about every tiny
procedure of apple picking in case that the apple would be broken and of no
worth. The worry and anxiety he had felt about the gains and losses did tire him
out. Thirdly, when the harvest he desired was finally obtained, he was fed up with
the harvest just as a man would get lost when he ultimately got the object he had
always been longing for. The apple picking may symbolize the writing of poems
for the writer, or the pursuit of one’s dream in the real life. The winter signified
the old age while the sleep served as an equivalence of death. What Robert Frost
wanted to say in this poem was his weariness after so many years’ hard work to
achieve the goal as well as his dissatisfaction of what life had paid him. The idea
of total retiracy sprung out of him, and he even thought of death. It was not the
only poem where the intention to escape from the temporal life appeared, but the
intention was not prevented here as in other poems like “Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening”. The instinct to leave the present life was not overpowered by
the superego which often forced him to stay on. The reason why the desire of his
inner self took the upper hand this time was that the poem talked about the old age
when the social codes were not so overwhelming.
To sum up, the exploration of Robert Frost on the relationship of him and his
inner self was often revealed as a battle. Most of the time, the superego won and
pushed the poet to go forward despite the depression and confusion, but the id
could finally expose itself at the end of life when almost every promised had been
obtained.

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 Though depicting the common issues such as mending walls or picking
apples and describing the ordinary landscape in New England such as woods,
birches and flowers, Robert Frost was engaged in the exploration of different
aspects of modern life. Donald G. Sheehy claims: “To read [his poems]
exclusively as a record of personal experience is, of course, to diminish its poetic
accomplishment, but to approach it without recognizing it to be a chapter of
personal crisis and resolution is finally to devalue the emotional and
psychological achievement that it represents” (394).
The reason why he could dig deeply and present philosophical thinking in his
simple poems is that he used a large number of metaphors. He thought “Metaphor
is the whole of poetry”, and “[p]oetry is simply made of metaphor” (Frost 786).
He even thought metaphor was the whole of thinking. Every poem illustrated
above was filled with metaphors, and every common image was just a symbol of a
certain basic element in life. By using metaphors, he started from daily rural life
and meditated on the various relationships: between man and nature, man and
God, man and other people, man and himself. As a matter of fact, he has not come
to any inflexible conclusion: he was always vacillating between love and fear for
nature, between suspicion and belief for God, between the optimistic and
pessimistic attitudes for human relations, and between the social responsibilities
and his desire to escape from reality. These ambivalences and conflicts manifested
his attitude that life was mixture of the dark side as well as the bright side.
Although he could not find an ultimate approach to settle these conflicts, Robert
Frost strived to find kind of balance through his exploration. As he said in “The
Figure a Poem Makes”, “[i]t begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it runs a
course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life— not necessarily a great

16
clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay
against confusion” (Frost 777). It is the “momentary stay against confusion”
achieved in each poem that enabled Robert Frost to find balance between the
ambivalences and conflicts.

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 Works Cited
Bressler, Charles E., ed. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and
Practice. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1994.
Faggen, Robert. Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost.
Ed. Faggen. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2004.
1- 6.
French, Roberts W.. “Robert Frost and the Darkness of Nature”. Critical Essays on
Robert Frost. Ed. Philip L. Gerber. New York: G. K. Hall, 1982. 155- 162.
Frost, Robert. Complete Poems, Prose and Plays of Robert Frost. New York:
Library of America, 1995.
---. Selected Letters of Robert Frost. Ed. Lawrance Thompson. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: a biography. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1996.
Sheehy, Donald G. “The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography by Robert
Frost.”
American Literature Oct, 1986: 393-409.
Sloan Gary. “Robert Frost: Old Testament Christian or Atheist?” 9 Mar. 2009.
http://liberator.net/articles/SloanGary/RobertFrost.html.

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