Emergency IT Lesson 2: Favourite poet

Robert Frost

(1874 - 1963)

"Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down.'"

- Robert Frost, "The Mending Wall"

Introduction

Robert Frost is recognized as an important "nature poet" in American literature, famous for his depiction of the New England landscape. Some of his most famous works include: "The Road Not Taken," "Mending Wall," "After Apple-Picking," and "Home Burial."

Robert Frost attempts to conceal the troubles of his life through the use of symbolism, metaphors and other literary devices in his writings. His tragic vision of man is disguised through the themes of love, friendship, family, and social relationship. He wrote to ease the tensions of his struggle for survival, individuality and happiness.

Frost's poetry not only teaches readers to understand basic concepts, but to contemplate them as well. Hence, Frost is also a philosopher. "The Mending Wall" is a wonderful example of this side of Frost. The surface of the poem comments on the literal walls neighbors build to separate their property. When pieces of these walls crumble, they are mended quickly. Further scrutiny leads one to a more personal understanding of this concept. One "must think beyond the stone walls of New Hampshire to walls within themselves and in the world, which in our day, are breaking and reforming" (Sergeant 415). Clearly, Frost is questioning the purpose of a physical wall around one's property; but he is also questioning the purpose of the symbolic walls people build around themselves. Frost makes his opinion apparent in the first line: "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" (Frost 983). The something that does not love a wall is the heart. In order to love and be loved (a need felt by most all of mankind) one cannot keep a barrier around their feelings and emotions."

Birth and Death

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. His father came from prerevolutionary Maine and New Hampshire stock but hated New England because the Civil War it had supported had robbed his own father of employment in the cotton mill economy. When Frost's father graduated from Harvard in 1872, he left New England. He paused in Lewistown, Pa., to teach and married another teacher, Isabelle Moodie, a Scotswoman. They moved to San Francisco, where the elder Frost became an editor and politician. Their first child was named for the Southern hero Gen. Robert E. Lee.
When Frost's father died in 1884, his will stipulated burial in New England. His wife and two children, Robert and Jeanie, went east for the funeral. Lacking funds to return to California, they settled in Salem, Mass., where Mrs. Frost taught school.

Frost's Complete Poems appeared in 1949, and in 1950 the U.S. Senate felicitated him on his seventy-fifth birthday. In 1957 he returned to England to receive doctoral degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. On his eighty-fifth birthday the Senate again felicitated him. In 1961, at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, Frost recited "The Gift Outright," the first time a poet had honored a presidential inauguration. A final volume, In the Clearing, appeared in 1962.
On Jan. 29, 1963, Frost died in Boston of complications following an operation. He was buried in the family plot in Old Bennington, Vt. His "lover's quarrel with the world" was over.

Poems

Three well-known poems by Robert Frost are listed below.

After Apple-Picking

by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,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.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was wellUpon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tellWhat form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling soundOf load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too muchOf apple-picking:

I am overtiredOf the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

A Patch of Old Snow

by Robert Frost

There's a patch of old snow in a corner

That I should have guessed

Was a blow-away paper the rain

Had brought to rest.
It is speckled with grime as if

Small print overspread it,

The news of a day I've forgotten

--If I ever read it.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

by Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

Bibliography:

http://www.terebess.hu/english/haiku/frost.html

http://www.answers.com/topic/robert-frost

http://writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/frost-mending.html

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/robert_frost.html

http://www.thesisabstracts.com/articles/publish/printer_178.shtml