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...
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