Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Robert Frost's poetry: Simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

Robert Frost, the classic American poet, wrote many poems about all kinds of things.  He wrote about building stone fences, choosing a path in a wood, or stopping to watch the snow fall.  But, are his poems just descriptions of scenes, or are they more?  Would it be too much to look at his poems metaphorically?  To put it another way, are Frost's poems simply deceptive or deceptively simple?

You could argue the point either way, but I feel that Frosts poems are deceptive; they have a deeper meaning to them.  The Road not Taken could just be a tale of a walk through the woods one day, but his wording implies that it is a metaphor about life and decisions in general.  In on point, Frost says "yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back".  If he was going for a actual walk, why wouldn't he ever come back to that fork in the trail.

Another example is Mending Wall.  There Frost recounts a seasonal task of repairing a stone fence with his neighbor.  Frost questions as to why there needs to be a fence, and his neighbor just responds: "good fences make good neighbors".  Frost is making a commentary about the barriers people create between each other in their lives.  He asks if such barriers that keep us all separate are necessary.  The general, unspoken response is that such barriers, like the separation between classes and ethnic backgrounds, are necessary to keep the peace.  "Good fences make good neighbors".

Many of Frost's poems have hidden meanings just below the surface.  You don't have to dig for them like you do in some other poet's work, but they are there and are worth noticing. 

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