Though Frost was at no time
a firm member of any Christian sect, he was significantly influenced by
puritanism. Robert Frost’s poetry, which is based on the land of pilgrims fathers,
is inspired by puritanism. During the early seventeenth century a band of
puritans immigrated to the New England;America from Europe. During the 1630s
and 1640s the puritans built a strong stance in the New England. Apart from the
setting, the puritan beliefs also form the themes of most of Frost’s poems. One
of the central beliefs of puritanism is the labour or hard work. Puritans do
not believe in the distinction between gentleman and laymen or landlords and
slaves. To them nobody is gentleman as Adam delved the ground and Eve span the wheels. This hard workong
nature is a characteristic of Frost’s poems. Moreover, like all puritan
literature, Frost’s poems are also simple and unornamented. He also uses
symbols in his writings like a typical puritan writer.
Robert Lee Frost,the folk
philosopher,is the most cherished nature poet of New England,the puritan land. He writes about
the objects ,the incidents ,the events and the characters of New England. But
Frost treats all these elemts of nature differently from the English romantics.
He takes the familiar objects as the subjet matters of his poetry but makes
them highly suggestive and symbolic to represent some universal
wisdom.Thus,though he is forever linked to the stone-pocked hills and woods of
New England, he treated some thems that have universal appeal.
Puritan life style
Frost
uses New England as a recurring setting throughout his work. New England is a
place where the European puritan immigrants settled. When they came, most of them
opted for Adam’s profession-cultivation. Thus, most of them became farmers.
Frost closely observed the life of the farmers of New England and depicted
their life in his poetry. Frost found
inspiration in his day-to-day experiences, basing “Mending Wall,” for instance,
on a fence near his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and “The Oven Bird” (1920) on birds indigenous to the nearby woods.
Solitary
travelers appear frequently in Frost’s poems, and their attitudes toward their
journeys and their surroundings highlight poetic and historical themes, including
the figure of the wanderer and the changing social landscape of New England.
The solitary traveler simultaneously exists as an observer of the landscape.
Found in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923),
“Into My Own,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Road Not Taken” (1920), among other poems, the solitary traveler
demonstrates the historical and regional context of Frost’s poetry.
Puritan belief of hard work
Labor
functions as a tool for self-analysis and discovery in Frost’s poetry. The
puritans came to New England and turned the uninhabitable and uncultivable land
into the habitable and cultivable land through their hard work. It is their
labour which helped them survive in that hostile environment. Frost praises labour or hard working
mentality in his poetry. Frost’s
speakers work, labor, and act—mending fences, as in “Mending Wall”; harvesting
fruit, as in “After Apple-Picking”; or cutting hay, as in “Mowing” (1915). Even children work, although the hard labor of
the little boy in “Out, Out—” (1920) leads to his
death. The boy’s death implies that while work was necessary for adults,
children should be exempted from difficult labor until they have attained the
required maturity with which to handle both the physical and the mental stress
that goes along with rural life. Frost implies that a connection with the earth
and with one’s self can only be achieved by actively communing with the natural
world through work.
Puritanic Style
One of the key elements of
the puritan writing is its plainness and simplicity. Like their life style,
their writing is also not ornamented , but simple and colloquial. Most striking
about these lyrics and narrative dialogues is their language: seemingly colloquial,
homely, unpoetical yet a sensitive literary idiom. More successfully than any
other American poet, Frost has fulfilled Wordsworth’s aim of using common
speech heightened by passion. In his diction there is none of the humorous condescension
of Lowell’s Yankee dialect; it is never assumed in a Frost poem that either the
poet or the reader is superior to the speaker. This is a democratic attitude.
Frost may be regarded as one of the stylists of the colloquial.
A friend once told Frost
that the tone of his verse was too much like talk. But fortunately Frost did not
change his style. It was just this tone that he had been trying to get into his
verse. He said that Emerson had already set forth the theory he was trying to
put into practice.
Symbolism
Puritans tried to interpret
everything symbolically. A simple event like falling of a leaf or appearing of
a meteor in the sky was interpreted symbolicaaly by the puritans. Symbols also
abound in Frost’s poems. ’’Mending Wall” presents to us the ideas
of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security
people gain from barriers.
The poem called `The
Mountain” has a symbolic signifiance. On that surface, the poem tells the story
of a man living at the foot of a mountain, who has never climbed to the top
either to see the great view from there or to see the brook that flows there,
or merely for the shake of climbing. But, on a deeper scrutiny, we find that
this man symboisesthe uninquisitive, unadventurous, unambitious spirit.
The
setting of "The Road Not Taken" is the symbolism of the poem, because
it communicates the idea and message. Our lives are like roads, with splitting
paths representing the different choices that we must make. Robert Frost
depicted the two paths that he had come across as being two separate ways
because he understood that he would probably never come back to see what was
down the path he did not choose, “Yet knowing how the way leads on to way/ I
doubted if I should ever come back”.
There
is a famous poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. On the surface, it is
a poem about a traveler who feels tempted to go into the woods which are
“lovely, dark and deep” and to stay there in order to enjoy their strange
beauty and charm, but who is not able to carry out his wish on account of the
realization that he has promises to keep and miles to go. But the poem has a
deeper, symbolic significance. The words “promises”, “miles”, and “sleep” have
deeper meanings. “Promises” and “miles to go” imply duties and
responsibilities. “Sleep” symbolizes death. There are the promises which he has
made to himself and to others, or which others have made on his behalf. And
there are the miles he must travel through other kinds of experience before he
yields to that final and inevitable commitment-death.
In the poem ’Fire and Ice”,
fire symbolizes the heat of passion while ice represents the cold hate. The
extremes of both passion and hate have the power to destroy and annihilate the
world.
Thus, Robert Frost was
inspired by puritan objects and themes in his poetry. New England or more strictly speaking that
part of it which lies north of Boston ,provides the rural context within which
Frost’s most characteristic poems presented. It is this rural world which
provides him not only with the setting ,but also with the objects ,the incidents
,the events and the characters he writes about. But Frost treats all these elements of nature differently from the English romantics. He takes the familiar
objects as the subject matters of his poetry but makes them highly suggestive
and symbolic to represent some universal wisdom.Thus,though he is forever linked
to the stone-pocked hills and woods of New England, he treated some thems that
have universal appeal.