Robert Frost
Lyndzie Garro
Mrs. Bosch
Honors 10 English
17 April 2007
Intriguing and Inspirational
There comes a time in a person’s life when they want or need to express themselves. Some people might express themselves by not talking, crying, yelling, listening to or composing music and lyrics, or by reading and writing stories. But perhaps the best means of expression is through poetry. Poetry is the lyrics of a song, it is the art of rhythmical composition, patronizing thought, or impassioned feeling expressed in imaginative words. Poetry uses figurative language to allow the reader to visualize the poem, as well as to connect with the author and themselves on a much deeper level. To do this, movement, procedure with uniform, and patterned recurrences of a beat, accents, or rhymes are used, which is referred to as rhythm. Poetry can be words of comfort, joy, advice, hatred, moroseness, love, emotions, or it can be about an object or person. Whatever a poem may be about, it reflects the author, or poet. A poet’s work may have been influenced by something that happened to them, something they felt, or something they may have seen. Poets use their lives, their experiences, their surroundings, and the lives of those around them as inspiration for their poems, as well as to make their poems interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate. Throughout history, there have been many motivating poets, such as modern poet Robert Frost. Frost’s main inspiration for his poems came from nature, other people, and his inner emotions.
A majority of Robert Frost’s poems were influenced by nature and his surroundings. All throughout his life, Frost had an interest in farms, but he was never very financially successful. After studying at Harvard without receiving a degree due to family problems and poor health, he had moved to Derry, New Hampshire, where he worked as a cobbler, teacher, and farmer. His surroundings, especially the farm, were very influential on his poetry, which is visible in his poem Dust of Snow:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued. (Frost lines 1-8)
Dust of Snow was an example of how Frost used nature to shift his mood. Nature seemed to be the anti-depressant that he needed due to family problems. Frost’s poems show “deep appreciation of the natural world and sensibility about the human aspirations…With his down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being burdened with pedantry” (Robert (Lee) Frost). Frost uses a looser free-verse, which is still more of a traditional form of poetry. He composed his poetry by using the language and experiences of his everyday life, but the most interesting and intriguing part of his poetry “lies in its layers of ambiguities and the deeper meaning hidden behind everyday themes that he uses” (Robert Frost-Biography). Frost’s life on the farm is also expressed in A Late Walk:
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.
And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words
A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you. (Frost)
A Late Walk is an example of his passion for nature, from the dew in the fields, to a simple flower, it all brought pleasant feelings and the memories would last forever. Nature and Frost’s rural surroundings were “a source for insights ‘from delight to wisdom” (Robert (Lee) Frost). According to Robert Frost, “Literature begins with geography” this shows how his surroundings and nature influenced him and caused his poetry to be more interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and very passionate.
In life, there are many different people from different parts of the world from different walks of life, all of whom may have a different impact on a person. Frost taught at many schools throughout his life, such as at his mother’s school in Methuen, Massachusetts, Pinkerton Academy, a school in Plymouth, as well as others. Frost also moved from America to England and vice versa, causing him to encounter many different people who had different impacts on him and were influences to his poems. In his life and his studies, he may have seen people who made him think morose thoughts such as death, which is expressed in his poem In a Disused Graveyard:
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestone on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie. (Frost)
In the poem, Frost spoke of the living, death, and the lies that come with death. Being born in 1874 and facing death in 1963, Frost had lived during World War II, causing him to either hear stories from or become acquainted with soldiers. The following excerpt from Frost’s A Soldier is an example of this:
He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, com dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust. (lines 1-3)
Frost used people he became acquainted with to make his poetry interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate by allowing the reader to connect with the subjects in the poem and relate to people whom they know. Although nature and people have a huge influence on people, perhaps one of the most influential things in poetry is one’s inner emotions and feelings.
What is perhaps the largest influence on poetry is one’s inner emotions and feelings. In the latter part of his life, Robert Frost experienced multiple family tragedies, some of which were inspiration for some of his most passionate works. Frost’s whole life had seemed to fall apart around the late 1930s, early 1940s. His wife had died in 1938, and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol committed suicide in 1940. Around this time, Frost suffered from depression and had continual self-doubt, which caused him to continuously be filled with sorrow, as in the following lines from his poem My November Guest:
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane. (lines 1-5)
The poem is an example of the sorrow taking over his life, causing him to change his ways. In a person’s life, when everything takes a turn for the worst, they often ask themselves whether or not their life was worth living, or even worth being born, like in Frost’s A Question:
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth. (Frost)
A Question relates to Frost and the doubts he had about his life and mere existence, but his question led him to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. When a person’s inner emotions and feelings take a hold of their life, their soul, they notice all the choices they have, but are not sure which ones to take. Robert Frost made those choices into one of his best works, The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. (Frost)
The Road Not Taken is a poem that explains how Frost took the choices that seemed out of the box, or uncommon. Robert Frost used his emotions, feelings, and choices to allow the reader relate to his emotional, interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate poems.
Poetry is an art of literature that is also a form of expression. Robert Frost was a modern American poet and “one of the finest of rural New England’s 20th century pastoral poets” (Robert (Lee) Frost). Frost had received much of his inspiration from his life, but mostly from his life on the farm, his experiences as a teacher, and family tragedies which caused unknown emotions to boil up inside and surface. Robert Frost had used experiences from his life to allow the audience to connect and make his poems stand out and be more interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate than other poets’ work. Frost’s interest for farms was a huge influence on some of his best works. When he was a teacher, he witnessed many people and their lives which he incorporated into his poems. When his life became difficult, and everything was falling apart, he wrote down his emotions and caused himself to be recognized as one of the most inspirational poets.
Works Cited
Robert Frost-Biography. 4 April 2007. Poet Seers. 4 April 2007. <http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/modern_poets/robert_frost/index_html/?searchterm=robert%20frost>.
Robert (Lee) Frost. 4 April 2007. 4 April 2007. <http://kirjasto.sci.fi/rfrost.htm>.
Mrs. Bosch
Honors 10 English
17 April 2007
Intriguing and Inspirational
There comes a time in a person’s life when they want or need to express themselves. Some people might express themselves by not talking, crying, yelling, listening to or composing music and lyrics, or by reading and writing stories. But perhaps the best means of expression is through poetry. Poetry is the lyrics of a song, it is the art of rhythmical composition, patronizing thought, or impassioned feeling expressed in imaginative words. Poetry uses figurative language to allow the reader to visualize the poem, as well as to connect with the author and themselves on a much deeper level. To do this, movement, procedure with uniform, and patterned recurrences of a beat, accents, or rhymes are used, which is referred to as rhythm. Poetry can be words of comfort, joy, advice, hatred, moroseness, love, emotions, or it can be about an object or person. Whatever a poem may be about, it reflects the author, or poet. A poet’s work may have been influenced by something that happened to them, something they felt, or something they may have seen. Poets use their lives, their experiences, their surroundings, and the lives of those around them as inspiration for their poems, as well as to make their poems interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate. Throughout history, there have been many motivating poets, such as modern poet Robert Frost. Frost’s main inspiration for his poems came from nature, other people, and his inner emotions.
A majority of Robert Frost’s poems were influenced by nature and his surroundings. All throughout his life, Frost had an interest in farms, but he was never very financially successful. After studying at Harvard without receiving a degree due to family problems and poor health, he had moved to Derry, New Hampshire, where he worked as a cobbler, teacher, and farmer. His surroundings, especially the farm, were very influential on his poetry, which is visible in his poem Dust of Snow:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued. (Frost lines 1-8)
Dust of Snow was an example of how Frost used nature to shift his mood. Nature seemed to be the anti-depressant that he needed due to family problems. Frost’s poems show “deep appreciation of the natural world and sensibility about the human aspirations…With his down-to-earth approach to his subjects, readers found it easy to follow the poet into deeper truths, without being burdened with pedantry” (Robert (Lee) Frost). Frost uses a looser free-verse, which is still more of a traditional form of poetry. He composed his poetry by using the language and experiences of his everyday life, but the most interesting and intriguing part of his poetry “lies in its layers of ambiguities and the deeper meaning hidden behind everyday themes that he uses” (Robert Frost-Biography). Frost’s life on the farm is also expressed in A Late Walk:
When I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.
And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words
A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you. (Frost)
A Late Walk is an example of his passion for nature, from the dew in the fields, to a simple flower, it all brought pleasant feelings and the memories would last forever. Nature and Frost’s rural surroundings were “a source for insights ‘from delight to wisdom” (Robert (Lee) Frost). According to Robert Frost, “Literature begins with geography” this shows how his surroundings and nature influenced him and caused his poetry to be more interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and very passionate.
In life, there are many different people from different parts of the world from different walks of life, all of whom may have a different impact on a person. Frost taught at many schools throughout his life, such as at his mother’s school in Methuen, Massachusetts, Pinkerton Academy, a school in Plymouth, as well as others. Frost also moved from America to England and vice versa, causing him to encounter many different people who had different impacts on him and were influences to his poems. In his life and his studies, he may have seen people who made him think morose thoughts such as death, which is expressed in his poem In a Disused Graveyard:
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestone on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never anymore the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
“The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.”
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie. (Frost)
In the poem, Frost spoke of the living, death, and the lies that come with death. Being born in 1874 and facing death in 1963, Frost had lived during World War II, causing him to either hear stories from or become acquainted with soldiers. The following excerpt from Frost’s A Soldier is an example of this:
He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, com dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust. (lines 1-3)
Frost used people he became acquainted with to make his poetry interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate by allowing the reader to connect with the subjects in the poem and relate to people whom they know. Although nature and people have a huge influence on people, perhaps one of the most influential things in poetry is one’s inner emotions and feelings.
What is perhaps the largest influence on poetry is one’s inner emotions and feelings. In the latter part of his life, Robert Frost experienced multiple family tragedies, some of which were inspiration for some of his most passionate works. Frost’s whole life had seemed to fall apart around the late 1930s, early 1940s. His wife had died in 1938, and he lost four of his children. Two of his daughters suffered mental breakdowns, and his son Carol committed suicide in 1940. Around this time, Frost suffered from depression and had continual self-doubt, which caused him to continuously be filled with sorrow, as in the following lines from his poem My November Guest:
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane. (lines 1-5)
The poem is an example of the sorrow taking over his life, causing him to change his ways. In a person’s life, when everything takes a turn for the worst, they often ask themselves whether or not their life was worth living, or even worth being born, like in Frost’s A Question:
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth. (Frost)
A Question relates to Frost and the doubts he had about his life and mere existence, but his question led him to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. When a person’s inner emotions and feelings take a hold of their life, their soul, they notice all the choices they have, but are not sure which ones to take. Robert Frost made those choices into one of his best works, The Road Not Taken:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. (Frost)
The Road Not Taken is a poem that explains how Frost took the choices that seemed out of the box, or uncommon. Robert Frost used his emotions, feelings, and choices to allow the reader relate to his emotional, interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate poems.
Poetry is an art of literature that is also a form of expression. Robert Frost was a modern American poet and “one of the finest of rural New England’s 20th century pastoral poets” (Robert (Lee) Frost). Frost had received much of his inspiration from his life, but mostly from his life on the farm, his experiences as a teacher, and family tragedies which caused unknown emotions to boil up inside and surface. Robert Frost had used experiences from his life to allow the audience to connect and make his poems stand out and be more interesting, inspirational, intriguing, and passionate than other poets’ work. Frost’s interest for farms was a huge influence on some of his best works. When he was a teacher, he witnessed many people and their lives which he incorporated into his poems. When his life became difficult, and everything was falling apart, he wrote down his emotions and caused himself to be recognized as one of the most inspirational poets.
Works Cited
Robert Frost-Biography. 4 April 2007. Poet Seers. 4 April 2007. <http://www.poetseers.org/contemporary_poets/modern_poets/robert_frost/index_html/?searchterm=robert%20frost>.
Robert (Lee) Frost. 4 April 2007. 4 April 2007. <http://kirjasto.sci.fi/rfrost.htm>.
posted by Lyndzie Garro at 10:00 AM
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