Puritan Elements in Robert Frost's Poetry

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.

Use of Symbols/Symbolism in the Poetry of Robert Frost

Robert Frost takes the familiar objects as the subject matters of his poetry but makes them highly suggestive and symbolic to represent some universal wisdom. Frost’s poetry abounds in  all familiar things like pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds etc. But Frost treats all these elements of nature differently from the English romantics. Though Frost is forever linked to the stone-pocked hills and woods of New England, he treated some themes that have universal appeal.

Robert Frost worked individual poems into a larger unity by presenting in them a recurrent speaker ,a wise country person living close to nature and approaching life in a spirit of compassionate realism.Many people assumed that this speaker was Frost himself ,but in fact it was a brilliant artistic creation ,a persona or mask . In addision he wrote many dramatic monologues whose speakers were New England farm people. The poems in which he makes use of the familiar aspects to suggest a symbolic meaning are Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods by Snowy Evening, Birches etc.

In the poem 'The Pasture', we are introduced with a farmer who is engaged in day to day farming life. The Pasture describes simple, every day pleasures on the farm. Here the speaker says he is setting out on an ordinary farm chore to clean the pasture spring of leaves, and perhaps wait for the water to clear. But in deeper sense the poem shows the process of purifying human hearts from sin.

Pasture symbolizes the world. To clean the pasture spring means to purify the heart and soul from sin. Leaves symbolize the sins that lie inside the heart. ’Wait to watch the water clear” means wait until the clear from sins.’To fetch the little calf” means to guide the people who still have weak faith. ’It totters when she licks it with her tongue” means God will send his messenger to guide the ordinary people. So, God will not directly give enlightenment to them.

In the poem ‘Mending Wall’, for example, Frost portrays a typical farming work in the context of New England. The New England farmers built walls as boundaries to their farms. These walls often became weak and broke down. So, they needed mending. The poem Mending Wall is also a poem about two neighbors and a wall. The wall acts as a divider in separating estates-apple and pine trees. It is a very common picture of farming life where the people believe that "Good fences make good neighbors." But the suggestiveness of the poem is very modern in its approach. The poem is based on the modern theme of isolation. Modern men built boundaries and made themselves isolated from each other. Frost’s metaphysical treatment of this physical and psychological isolation is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:

Good fences make good neighbor

and the modern radical farmer says:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,  

But the question remains unsolved. And it is up to the readers if they will keep the wall or pull down it.

'Stopping By woods on a Snowy Evening' is another poem, in which the familiar things finally become highly suggestive. Apparently, the poem describes the evening walk of a rural farmer, may be the poet himself. But out of his evening walk beside a snowy woods, the traveler discovers a truth universal in appeal.

 

In the poem “Mowing” the poet as a laborer identifies himself with his scythe. The narrator works in the field on a hot day.  He notices that his scythe seems to be whispering as it works. Instead of dreaming about inactivity or reward for its labor as a person would, the scythe takes its sole pleasure from its hard work. It receives satisfaction from “the fact” of its earnest labor in the field, not from transient dreams or irrational hopes. The narrator follows the scythe’s example: seizing on the pleasure of hard work and making hay.

In the poem 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' Frost has taken notice of both the bright and dark aspects of nature. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking turmoil and storms:

Be glad of water, but don’t forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

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. We are not told that the call of social responsibility proves stronger than the attraction of the woods, which are "lovely" as well as "dark and deep’. The dichotomy of the poet's obligations both to the woods and to a world of promises is what gives this poem a universal appeal.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

The closing stanza of the poem is especially symbolic. The poem symbolically expresses the conflict which everyone feels between the demands of the practical life and a desire to escape into the land of reverie.

 

The poem “The Road Not Taken” was also based on the poet’s personal experience. It was based on his visit to the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire in 1911-1912. But the poem symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from one another mentally and emotionally, though they live together or as neighbors in the society. At the heart of the poem is the romantic mythology of flight from a fixed world of limited possibility into a wilderness of many possibilities combined with trials and choices through which the pilgrim progresses to divine perfection.

 'Apple Picking' describes the feelings, of a man who has been plucking apples from the apple trees. He's describing how he takes them off the tree and places them in a bucket and sends them off. His is a tired apple picker. He cherishes the apples like they were jewels. After a long day’s work, the speaker is tired of apple picking and feels sleep coming on.

Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.

The poem Design is saying that god is both good and evil and has a design for all things big and small. The whiteness of the flower, spider, and moth represent purity. However the scene itself could be construed as evil. But since everything is under god's design he must have designed it to happen that way. Perhaps he is saying that everything can be looked upon as good or evil depending on your perspective.

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.

Robert Frost’s insightful yet tragic poem “Out, Out--” employs realistic imagery and the personification of a buzz saw to depict how people must continue onward with their lives after the death of a loved one, while also hinting at the selfish nature of the human race, whom oftentimes show concern only for themselves.

Frost begins the poem by describing a young boy cutting some wood using a buzz-saw. The setting is Vermont and the time is late afternoon. The sun is setting and the boy's sister calls him to come and eat supper. As the boy hears its dinner time he gets excited and cuts his hand by mistake. Realizing that the doctor might cut his hand off because of this, he immediately asks his sister to make sure that does not happen. By the time the doctor arrives it is too late and the hand is already lost. When the doctor gives him anaesthetic, the boy falls asleep never to wake up again. The last sentence of the poem which states that "since they [the boys family and the doctor] were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" shows how although the boys death is tragic, people move on with their life.

Robert Frost as a New England Poet or Everyday 'New England Farming Life' in the poetry of Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost,the folk philosopher,is the most cherished nature poet of  New England,America. 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 the themes that have universal appeal.

Except for the brief period of his stay in England ,Frost was himself a farmer all his life ,from early boyhood down to his ripe old age .Poetry was his vocation ,but farming was his avocation.He combined the two and this gave him an intimate knowledge of the life the farmers and hence arises the truthfulness of his depictions of rural life.

In the poem 'The Pasture', for example, we are introduced with a farmer who is engaged in day to day farming life. The Pasture describes simple, every day pleasures on the farm. Here the speaker says he is setting out on an ordinary farm chore to clean the pasture spring of leaves, and perhaps wait for the water to clear. This was a typical life style of most of the farmers of New England.

The title of the poem ‘Mending Wall’ suggests a typical farming work. The New England farmers built walls as boundaries to their farms. These walls often became weak and broke down. So, they needed mending. The poem Mending Wall is also a poem about two neighbors and a wall. The wall acts as a divider in separating estates-apple and pine trees. It is a very common picture of farming life where the people believe that "Good fences make good neighbors."

In the poem “Mowing” the poet as a laborer identifies himself with his scythe. The narrator works in the field on a hot day.  He notices that his scythe seems to be whispering as it works. Instead of dreaming about inactivity or reward for its labor as a person would, the scythe takes its sole pleasure from its hard work. It receives satisfaction from “the fact” of its earnest labor in the field, not from transient dreams or irrational hopes. The narrator follows the scythe’s example: seizing on the pleasure of hard work and making hay.

Robert Frost as a Modern Poet

In spite of the Pastoral element predominant in Frost’s poems, he is still a modern poet because his poetry has been endowed with the awareness of the problems of man living in the modern world dominated by Science and Technology. However, he was a contemporary and friend to such modernist greats as Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens. But as a modern poet Frost is different from other modern poets.

While modernist poetry is sometimes associated with an elitist culture that takes poetry away from the general public through experimental forms and esoteric references, Frost’s is a mordern poet in his rural, working-class persona, his traditional, metered voice and use of colloquial phrases, as well as the mundane subjects of most of his poems.

The major modern themes

The modern elements of his poetry are those of capitalism, the self-centeredness of the modern man, the bored existence, isolation, dilemma, and symbolism.

Two major poems

The poems that seemed to me most striking modern in nature are The Death of the Hired Man and Home Burial. The two poems are similar in nature that in both of them there is a conflict between the husband and the wife. Here the husbands represent a view of life which is very antithetical to wives’.

In the former poem there are three characters: Warren, Mary and Silas. Warren, the domineering husband represent the capitalism ,Mary, the cowed wife is a foil to her husband and Silas represent the lot of the millions of the workers who are the victims of the modern capitalistic society .Like Silas there are millions of the workers around the globe who toil and toil ,but remain unrewarded and die an unlamented death.

Thus the central figure of the poem is Silas, whose death the poem records. The character of Silas is very pathetic and sympathy arousing. Silas in his old age, helpless and useless, is a pathetic decrepit figure alienated from the world, with no shelter over his head and with no home to go to. His self respect makes him feel ‘ashamed to please his brother’ and as a result he is also isolated from his rich banker brother.

It is true that Warren has some accusations against Silas that he left the farm during the busy days. But in this case Warren also can’t fully understand Silas’s character. Why did he leave? He left for ht higher wages. It shows that Silas was very poorly paid for his labor. So, Warren does not find any fault in his own capitalistic manner by which he tried to buy the labor of Silas in return of the little wages. In this way he represents the capitalist society of the modern world.

The poem Home Burial is also based on a modern theme namely the self-centeredness. Here the over-wrought wife is a foil to the practical husband. They hold two diametrically opposite views of life. The wife ,under the burden of the grief over the death of her first new-born ,can’t forget that her husband himself dug the grave of their own child in their little grave-yard and himself buried him there. But to the husband, it seems a normal act that he should have dug the grave of his own son. He has come to accept the death of his son as an accident whose grief can be submerged beneath the everyday existence of life.

In order to make his wife accept the accident the husband gives some arguments. He says-

No, from the time when one is sick to death

One is alone and he dies more alone.

Friends make pretence of following to the grave

But before one is in it, their mind is turned.

Thus the husband speaks out the selfish nature of the modern men who even betray with the dead. All human sympathy is gone and it has been replaced by selfishness. In this way the poem is a modern domestic epic, which exposes some modern crises to our eyes.

Mending Wall

The poem Mending Wall is also very modern in its approach. The poem is based on the modern theme of isolation. Modern men built boundaries and made themselves isolated from each other. Frost’s metaphysical treatment of this physical and psychological isolation is also an evidence of his modernity. In “Mending Walls”, Frost juxtaposes the two opposite aspects of the theme of the poem and then leaves it to the reader to draw his own conclusion. The conservative farmer says:

Good fences make good neighbor

and the modern radical farmer says:

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

But the question remains unsolved. And it is up to the readers if they will keep the wall or pull down it.

Modern approach to Nature

It is true that Frost’s poetry abounds in pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. But his approach to nature and this natural phenomenon are different from the Romantics and is very realistic and modern in nature. His retreat to the country side is not the romantic escape from the harsh, unpleasant realities of modern life. The rural world, the world of nature into which he withdraws, is not a world of dreams ,a pleasant fanciful Arcadia ,but harsher and more demanding than the urban world.

Unlike Romantics he has taken notice of both the bright and dark aspects of nature as we see in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time”. Beneath the apparently beautiful calm there is lurking turmoil and storms:

Be glad of water, but don’t forget

The lurking frost in the earth beneath

In fact the world of nature in Frost’s poetry is not a world of dream. It is much more harsh, horrible and hostile than the modern urban world. Hence his experience of the pastoral technique to comment on the human issue of modern world his realistic treatment of Nature, his employment of symbolic and metaphysical techniques and the projection of the awareness of human problems of the modern society in his poetry justly entitle him to be looked up to as modern poet.

Problems of Modern life

In fact, Frost’s poetry portrays the disintegration of values in modern life and the disillusionment of the modern man in symbolical and metaphysical terms as much as the poetry of great, modern poets does, because most of his poems deal with persons suffering from loneliness and frustration, regrets and disillusionment which are known as modern disease. In “An old Man’s Winter Night”, the old man is lonely, completely alienated from the society, likeness, the tiredness of the farmer due to over work in “Apple-Picking” and as a result of it his yielding to sleep:

For I have too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of great harvest I myself desired.

The Poem The Road Not Taken also deals with the dilemma of the modern mind. The poem depicts the confusion which prevails in modern life. The modern man does not know which way to go and it is difficult for him to make a choice. He is confused and his life does not have a clear purpose. The speaker in the poem represents the modern man, who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made, but belatedly and wishfully sighs over the attractive alternative which he rejected:

I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere 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.

Symbolism

The symbolic technique followed by Frost is also very modern in nature. The poems that are rich in symbolic meaning are Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Stopping by Woods by Snowy Evening, Birches etc.

Mending Wall is a symbolic poem in which he describes an anecdote typical of the conservative approach of the rural people in New England, but it has the universal symbolic implication.

The poem Stopping By woods on a Snowy Evening is also full of symbols. The poem symbolically expresses the conflict which everyone feels between the demands of the practical life and a desire to escape into the land of reverie. The closing stanza of the poem is especially symbolic.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.

“The Road Not Taken” symbolizes the universal problem of making a choice of invisible barriers built up in the minds of the people which alienate them from one another mentally and emotionally thought they live together or as neighbors in the society. Similarly the Birch trees in “Birches” symbolize man’s desire to seek escape from the harsh suffering man to undergo in this world.

Critics have a difference of opinion over considering him a modern poet. Frost is a pastoral poet – poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, and seeds and birds. They do not treat such characteristically modern subjects as ‘the boredom implicit in sensuality’, ‘the consciousness of neuroses’ and ‘the feeling of damnation’.

But the recent critical conversations have resuscitated a little noted argument from the late seventies in favor of viewing Frost as modernist.

While Frost does not place the whole course of Western history into doubt or experiment with innovative formal structure and with the position of the reader – characteristics of the work of other modernist poets -- he does tend toward a critique of the increasing alienation of modern life, as well as foster a sense of the visual that is so important to some groups of modernists like the imagists (who favorably reviewed Frost’s work).

According to J.F.Lynen the use of the pastoral technique by Frost in his poems, does not mean that the poet seeks an escape from the harsh realities of modern life. He argues that it provides him with a point of view.

Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on the modern lifestyle. His pastoralism thus registers a protest against the disintegration of values in the modern society and here he is one with great poets of the modern age like T.S.Eliot, Yeats and Hopkins.