Frost's Home Burial Tragedy Will Essay

Total Length: 700 words ( 2 double-spaced pages)

Total Sources: 5

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Judith Oster notes that the poem is of such a nature that it represents the real trauma that occurs after a tragic loss. She writes, "Home is only suffocating when the marriage is unhappy" (Oster 300) and that its subject matter is too dramatic and tragic too realistically ties to failure in human love to have poetic form as its principal subject" (300). Richard Poirier claims that this poem is one of Frost's "greatest dramatizations" of the theme of home, in which the husband and wife share the same "pressure" (Richard Poirier 123). Richard Thorton states that Frost's description of this home represents how "unending work distorts grief into callousness" (Thornton 257). The role of the husband is "ambiguous" (123) while he does his best to "comprehend the wife's difficulties, he is only partially able to do so" (124). "The very title of the poem means something about the couple as well as about the dead child buried in the back of the house. It is as if 'home' were a burial plot for all of them" (124).A part of their marriage and their feelings toward each other died, making the home a living tomb.

"Home Burial" illustrates Frost's diversity as a poet. This poem touches on one of the most painful things a marriage can endure and he does so with a painful honesty. Parents grieve for more than a lost baby when they lose a child, they also grieve the loss of their life as it once was. Husband and wife are forever changed and they must fight to keep their love alive in a troubling, depressing atmosphere filled with mourning.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. "Home Burial." Robert Frost's Poems. New York: Pocket Books, 1916.

Oster, Judith. Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1994.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Macmillan. 2000.

Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of Robert Frost. Dartmouth: UPNE. 2004.

Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. Palo Alto: Sanford University Press.

1990.

Lowell, Amy.….....

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