Robert Frost as a nature poet

Name - Parmar Shubhda A.

Paper 10 (The American Literature)

Roll no - 30

Submitted by - S.B Gardi

                        Department of English

                       MKBU

      

Introduction:

    

               Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, his father, William Prescott Frost Jr., and his mother Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. The death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister. Frost drifted from side to side a thread of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor. His first published poem, “My Butterfly," appeared on November 8, 1894, in the New York news paper The Independent.

                 Robert Frost was the most important modern American poet of nature. He is very well regarded for his practical of rural life and his control of American informal speech. His work normally employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes .But, when positive views are expressed constantly in one poem after another, one may be excused for taking them as meaningful of his careful view of life .Usually study of Frost on Man, God, Nature. Many poems of frost, written at different periods of his life are constant to the imagery make known minuteness of observation and conformity of description.  Robert Frost was one such example that used Romanticism in his writings. Robert Frost uses his poetry to produce a connection between man and nature, by showing how nature can relieve, teach and impact choices made by mankind.  Generally in poems of Frost use of nature imagery. His grasp and understanding of natural fact is well known. Though Frost is not trying to tell us how nature works. His poems are as regards human psychology. Rural scenes and landscapes, homely farmers, and the natural world are used to show a psychological great effort with everyday experience met with bravery, will and purpose in the context of Frost's life and personal psychology. His attitude is indifferent, truthful and compliant. Frost uses nature as a background. He usually begins a poem with an observation of amazing in nature and then moves toward a relationship to some human position or concern. Frost is neither a transcendentalist nor a pantheist.

                          John F. Lynen says that,

‘Frost has so many and such excellent and so characteristic that it must be given a prominent place in any account of his art.’

             Frost is a great lover of nature, and he is also best lover of birds and insects. In his poem the hills and dales, trees , animals , rivers and forest , flowers and plants , seasons and seasonal changes , which has been presented in one poem after another poems .Generally intense and kindly was his  interest in birds , he observed their ways and lifestyle , minutely. Because when birds ‘are singing its style always change. Birds also illustrates Frost’s habit of organization his philosophy or moral at his nature poems. Thus bird teaches him. Frost can understand that, ‘Nature’s first green is gold’, but it would be a fault to believe that Frost is a mere painter of pleasant landscapes.

                Frost is great poet of restrictions and there are boundaries which separate man from nature .There may be  positive moments when man is special and nature takes a understanding interest in him, but such moments are rare .Frost's use of nature is the particular most misunderstood element of his poetry. Frost said over and over, "I am not a nature poet. “There is generally a person in his poems. Nature does not idealize - that is the work of man, so maybe there is a person there after all. Most of Frost's poems use nature imagery. His snatch and accepting of natural fact is well recognized. However Frost is not trying to tell us how nature works.  The control of nature in Robert Frost's works creates a palette to paint a picture filled with symbolism for the reader to understand.

                             John F. Lynen says,

‘Even in Frost‘s most cheerful nature sketches there     is always a bitter –sweet quality.’

                        

                   

 In the analysis of Robert Frost's ‘The Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening ‘we can find out specific examples to demonstrate Frost's overall use of nature. Robert Frost saw nature as an alien force capable of destroying man, but he also saw man's struggle with nature as a heroic battle. Even though he loved natural beauty, Frost knew the insensitive facts of the natural world.

                

             As W.H. Auden has pointed out,

    ‘ Frost’s ‘poems on natural objects are always concerned with them not as fact for mystical mediation or starting points for fantasy, but as things with which and on which , man acts in the course of the daily work of gaining a livelihood .’

                

                 He viewed these opposites as simply different aspects of truth that could be embraced in poetry. He accepts these facts with honesty and is remorseless in his realization of them. He probes the quality of truth and accepts that there may be no answer. His realism is also seen in the reality that he does not picture the natural world as better than man’s .Nature’s world is disordered, it is human labour only which can turn it into a well organized and beautiful garden. Really realism is feature of frost’s nature poetry. And Frost is not concerned with nature as such but more worried with beauty of nature.

        Frost uses nature as metaphor. He observes great in nature and says this is like that. He leads make a relationship, but never forces it on the reader. Read on a literal level, Frost's poems evermore make perfect sense. His facts are right, especially in botanical and biological terms. But he is not trying to tell nature stories nor animal stories. He is always using these metaphorically implying a similarity to some human apprehension. The reader may or may not be reminded of the same thing that the poet was belief of when he wrote the poem, but he hopes the reader is close. His poetic desire starts with some psychological concern and finds its way to a material personification which usually includes a natural scene. Frost always takes time to explain it with sympathy and care while using good poetic technique especially figurative language. Many of his poems are text book examples of the use of imagery and poetic devices of all kinds. He was a skilled poet.

            Frost struggled all his life with a traditional faith-based analysis of the world and the rise of science. It is still being argued whether or not he believed in God. Unusually, people of conflicting beliefs can find explanation of their views in Frost, because this poet is full of contradictions. Basically he believed in an ever changing open-ended universe, which could not be explained with systematical thought, whether it be science, religion or philosophy. He declared that progress was simply a metaphor for a changing world. Each of these poems demonstrates different aspects of Frost’s style, some are long narrative works that are more like short stories than poems, and others speak to his intelligent sense of irony and literary brilliance. Throughout all of these selections, however, there is a shared focus on the deeper meaning of everyday activities, the rural setting of New England, and the “truth” of real people and real struggles.

             He believed the universe was not able to be understood and his poems reflect the withheld judgment based on his disbelief. He declared he was not a believer. He said, "I have no doubts about my beliefs." The contradictions Frost found in the world did not problem him. He saw no reason to decide them but believed that man acting in freedom could balance the contradictions in a sort of play.

                    In the first stanza of Robert Frost's poem ‘Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening ‘ we find the speaker reflecting on the beauty of a wooded area with snow falling.

                Whose woods these are I think I know.

                His house is in the village though;

                He will not see me stopping here

                To watch his woods fill up with snow.

       

     

                       We can feel the speakers’ fearfulness and reflective peace when looking into the woods that night. He doesn't know the owner of the land, but is still drawn to the beauty of the scene. Nature poet Robert Frost gives a scene that is taken into the reader and digested for a time in the speaker's intellect. It shows us that it is all right to take a minute out of a sudden hour and reflect upon what is around you, whether it is a snowy wood or a quiter room. The great interest and accute love to the nature makes him a great poet of nature.

                      The reader can tell that Frost does love water. He also likes the power of it and expressing to through nature. He also brings up other points of nature, but it at all times has water. The water is always breaking down cliffs, beaches and boulders. Frost's poems are similar but are also very different, but they all have nature in them.

                    One point of view on which almost all the critics agree is Robert Frost’s minute observation and correct description of the different aspects of nature in his poems.

                                  

            Schneider says:

‘The descriptive power of Mr. Frost is to me the most wonderful thing in his poetry.’

               

                   A snowfall, a spring thaw, a bending tree, a valley mist, a brook, these are brought into the understanding of the reader. Thus the beauty of Nature and obligations of human life are treated by Frost as two aspects of poet’s.

                 Nature is a dominant subject in the poetry of Robert Frost. The isolation of nature reveals the tragedy of man’s isolation and his weakness in the face of vast, impersonal forces. But nature also serves to glorify man by showing the control of the human consciousness to brute matter .In this respect, nature becomes a means of portraying the heroic. There is an essential ambiguity of feelings in frost’s view of nature.

                    In the epitaph that Robert Frost proposed for himself, he said that he had “a lover of quarrel with the world,” this lover’s quarrel is Frost’s poetic subject, and during his poetry there are evidences of this view of man’s existence in the natural world. His attitude towards Nature is one of armed and agreeable true and mutual respect. He recognizes and insists upon the boundaries which exist between individual man and the forces of Nature.

         “There is almost nothing of the mystic in Frost. He does not ask for in Nature either a sense of oneness with all created things or union with God. There is nothing spiritual in his view of life, because it is a revelation of something else.” Robert Frost treats Nature both as a comfort and menace.

                                         As a critic says,

“Frost does not formulate a theory of Nature or of man’s relationship with Nature. However, it seems that Frost believes that man should live in harmony with Nature and not go against Nature or natural process.” 

                    

                Frost places a great deal of significance on Nature in all of his collections. Because of the time he spent in New England, the majority of pastoral scenes that he describes are inspired by specific locations in New England. However, Frost does not limit himself to conventional pastoral themes such as sheep and shepherds. Instead, he focuses on the dramatic struggles that occur within the natural world, such as the difference of the changing of seasons and the negative side of nature. Frost also presents the natural world as one that inspires deep metaphysical thought in the individuals who are exposed to it. For Frost, Nature is not simply a background for poetry, but rather a central character in his work. Robert Frost is a marvelous poet that many admire today. He is a motivation to many poets today. His themes and ideas are wonderful and are valued by many. His themes are overflowing however a main one used is the theme of nature. Frost uses nature to express his views as well as to make his poetry attractive and easy to imagine in your mind through the detail he supplies.

           In this sonnet ‘Design’, Robert Frost describes a simple scene from nature; a spider on a flower is holding a moth that it has captured as its prey. But Frost's portrayal is filled with gothic imagery, including the fact that all three elements: the spider, the flower and the moth are transparent, which here seems to embody, not clarity and goodness, but deathly transparent ness.

              

        

                 

              Frost makes the scene sound cold-blooded, and terrible, and then uses it to suggest that the larger design of nature is equally heartless or spiteful. The second and third question in the last part of the poem even advise that nature has designs on living things, in which it sets up events to facilitate killing and death:

       What brought the kindred spider to that height
       then steered the transparent moth thither in the night?
       What but design of darkness to appall?
        If design govern in a thing so small.

                  The powerful rhyme, reinforcing the ironic comment in the last line, of poem , and leaves the interested reader horrified at what appears to be the sinister world of nature. Frost also switches color imagery at the end, and now the references to the color transparent are succeeded by a reference to "design of darkness to appall."

            

              The poem “Mending Wall” by frost presents his thoughts of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security that people acquire from building barriers.

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

    That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

    And spills the upper boulders in the sun,

    And makes gaps even two can pass breast.

              The narrator conveys his wonder about a phenomenon, through these lines. That he has observed in mature. He says that he has observing something puzzling takes place in nature which does not love the existence of walls. That ‘something makes the frozen ground to bloat under the wall and fall the stone wall on the boundary of his property.  So a gap is created in the wall through which two people can pass together. Frost says that, sometimes even careless hunters spoil the walls but he drives them away and repairs the gap. The hunters pull down the stones of the walls. This way they look for rabbits hiding under the wall to please their barking dogs.

           The theme of the poem is about two neighbors who differ over the need of a wall to separate their properties. Not only does the wall act as a barrier to friendship, communication. From the narrator’s view, barriers lead to isolation and emotional isolation and loneliness. The narrator cannot help but notice that the natural world seems to dislike of a wall as much as he does and therefore, mysterious gaps appear from nowhere and boulders fall for no reason. The poem portrays the lack of friendship between two neighbors, they now each other but they are not friends. There exists a communication gap between them; they meet each other only on selected days to fix the wall sorting out their properties. So, the poem is a sad reflection on today’s society, where man-made barriers exist between men, groups, nations based on unfairness of race, caste, creed, gender and religion.

Conclusion:

                     Each of these poems reveals a slightly different side of Robert Frost, just as the collections of poetry from different times in his life provides a sight into his development as an artist. Each poem should be read with the understanding that Frost instilled meaning into even the most basic aspects of a work, from the number of feet in a line to the particular sound of a syllable. As a result, the poems have endless possibilities in terms of meaning and understanding and should be seen as an opportunity for the mind to revel in investigation.  

                  Frost’s view of nature is unique may not at first be clear, for the modern reader’s attitude toward .Nature poetry is pretty well gritty by the Lake poets and their English successors. The very act of writing about nature seems to mean a commitment to treat it as poets in , with the result that most people take Frost’s nature poetry as they take Wordsworth’s or Tennyson’s .

                    Really frost‘s poems have done that with a settling of scores. In the happiness of what other great thing these people have made this rejection, we cannot know for certain. But we can guess that it was in the significance of truth, of some truth, of some truth of the self.