SOMBRE THEMES IN ROBERT FROST’S

POETRY
Much of Frost’s finest poetry deals with melancholy and somber themes. This is especially
true of the great dramatic poems from the volume called “North of Boston”. ‘Mending
wall’ deals with man’s willful separation f rom man. ‘A Servant to Servant’ and ‘After Apple
Picking’ present the consequences of man’s having to earn his bread by the sweat of his
brow: the consequences are madness in one poem and, in the other, an acute sense of
mortality, of death-in-life.

‘After Apple Picking’ describes the feeling of a man who has been plucking apples
from the apple trees, with his long two pointed ladder striking through a tree towards
heaven. The man is tired of the work he has been doing and so he says: “But I am done with
apple-picking now”. The scent of apples, as well as the fatigue, makes him drowsy so that
the world looks strange to him. He thus expresses his state of mind:

For I have too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

He anticipates the dreams that he will see “magnified apples”, “stem end and blossom
end” and “every fleck of russet”. He is not sure what kind of sleep he will have, whether it
will be like the woodchuck’s long sleep, or “just some human sleep”. The poem obviously
has a symbolic meaning. The task of apple picking is any task. It may represent life itself.
The sleep at the end of the poem represents death. The fatigue cause by apple picking is
the symbol of weariness of life. Even though the tasks of life are yet unfulfilled because
the speaker thinks of the barrel which he has not yet filled with apples.

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

“Stopping by Woods” suggests deep thoughts about death and about life. The dark
woods silently filling up with the coldness of snow symbolize death which is an absolute
answer having a strange attraction for man. The speaker in the poem is attracted toward
this answer, but he turns away from it because he decides, with a certain weariness, and
yet with quite determination, to face the needs and demands of life.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

“Stopping by Woods” is certainly a melancholy poem. The atmosphere of

melancholy is built up in the first two stanzas when the poet talks of the snow -filled lonely
woods without a farm house near, the frozen lake, and the darkest evening of the year.

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In the third stanza, the horse’s reaction to the lonely surroundings, already indicated in the
second stanza, is further developed. And the poem rounds off with a tragic reference to
sleep or death. This poem, with its haunting conclusion, has gained world -wide popularity
chiefly on account of its fascinating atmosphere of sadness. Human complications of
responsibility and desire become sharply painful in the poem largely through their contrast
with Nature’s impersonal simplicity. The poem may be regarded as an effort a t a fantasy
escape from the world of social considerations band ethical complexity, the melancholy
world of man, though the effort proves abortive.

The poems “Home-Burial” and ‘A Servant t o Servants’ are two of the moving and
dramatic poems ever written. ‘An O ld Man’s Winter Night’ is cruelly disenchanting. These
poems are extraordinary subtle and tragic. They begin with a flat and terrible reproduction
of the evil, in the world. They end by saying: “it’s so; and there’s nothing you can do about
it; and if there were, would you ever do it?’

Three poems, written at different stages of Frost’s life show the same thing: a
concern with an imagined withdrawal from the complicated world we all know into a
mysterious loveliness symbolized by woods or darkness. These p oems are ‘Into My Own”
(1913), ‘stopping By Woods’ (1923), and ‘Come In’ (1942). The earlier poem accepts the call,
at least in fantasy, while the other two, though recognizing it , reject it. The very desire to
withdraw from life shows an attitude of dejection.

Written and Composed By:

Prof. A. R. Somroo

M.A. English, M.A. Education

Cell: 03339971417