Comments & Themes

Study Questions. You can reflect and write a paper on the following topics:

• The new pastoral mode

• The ethics of love and labor

• Frost’s romantic influences

• Realism, naturalism and romantic trends in Frost’s poems

• Analyze one of the following poems to show how Frost’s poetic technique itself serves as his own “momentary stay against confusion”: “Once by the Pacific,” “Desert Places,” or “Design.”

• Discuss the limitations and isolation of the individual in either a social or natural environment, plus the related theme of how difficult it is for the self to understand existence.

• Discuss the ambiguity and darkness of nature. Is it a source of truth and wisdom?

• Discuss Frost’s treatment of entropy, doom, and extinction.

• Frost’s use of irony

• The dark designs, free will, apocalyptic visions and optimism

• Many of Frost’s poems gravitate between heaven and earth as in “Birches”, “A Steeple on the House”, “One more brevity”

• Nature and man

• The encounter between the self and the world

• Belief and skepticism in Frost’s poems

• The motif of home in “Death of a Hired Man” and “Home Burial”.

• Compare Wordsworth “The Solitary Reaper” and Frost’s “Mowing”

• Nihilism and belief in Frost’s poems.

• Frost’s way of “making it new”

• “Birches” and Shelley’s “Adonais”

• Frost’s dramatic dialogues and Eliot’s interior monologue. Compare “Death of a Hired Man”, “Home Burial” and Prufrock

• The quest for truth “For, once then, something”

• American myth of self-reliance and “The Road not taken”

• The poet as craftsman and the art of poetry in “The Oven Bird”, “Hyla Brook”, Mowing, The Pasture