only by suspending one's reasonable awareness of what flowers can and cannot do." (Nitchie, W
The setting of the poem is clear. It begins "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," making it clear that the narrator is standing in a yellow wood (Frost, 1916)
2), and Robert joined a street gang before he moved from his birth city of San Francisco (Meyers, p. 2) at the age of 11 (Wikipedia, 2006) after Robert's father died of tuberculosis (Lovett-Graff, 2004)
" "Night" might represent a number of things, including grief or a feeling of "being in the dark" from lack of information. In fact, Frost's childhood family was highly dysfunctional, with a number of secrets kept from him, including the actual year of his birth (Meyers, p
The subsequent quotation demonstrates this fact. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/…Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back" (Frost)
The fact that there are green leaves, which had yet to be trampled by any other travelers creates images of the raw elements of nature, untamed with no safe answers or means of passage. This interpretation is consistent with the belief that Frost viewed "nature as an antagonist" (Liebman 417)
Figuratively, of course, this sort of lamenting is symbolic of the regret that people feel about their decisions in their lives. Frost's preoccupation with such a commonality to everyone's life is one of the reasons he is regarded as "Among major poets of the English language" (Paton 72)
Trees, leaves, bushes, and grass become individual aspects of the speaker's choice as he examines the roads. He looks "down one as far as I could / to where it bent in the undergrowth" (Frost the Road Not Taken 4-5), looking for some kind of clue or sign
Ice is equated with hate. Fire and ice are born in the dark reaches of inner space, in the smoldering, ice-sheathed human heart" (Hansen)
The sight reminds the poet of his youth and here the poem explores what exists in our mind and what lives on earth. Louis Untermeyer agrees, claims "fact and fancy play together" (Untermeyer 88) in this poem
Still another child, Irma, had to be institutionalized for the same type of mental disorders as his sister, Jeannie, and Frost himself suffered lifelong bouts of clinical depression (Holman & Snyder, 2012). Frost proved unsuccessful as a farmer and tradesman but his writing was recognized as worthwhile while he was still in high school (Thompson, 1995)
He is a master of his exacting medium, blank verse, -- a new master. (Garnett)
"The desire to withdraw from the world and love of the earth is symbolized in the boy's game of swinging birch trees." (Lynen)
I would like to examine "Acquainted with the Night," taking each stanza individually to show how Frost's literary art manages to construct a universal-seeming situation out of naturalistic description. Deirdre Fagan notes that Frost's narrator in "Acquainted with the Night" is "uncharacteristically urban" (Fagan 22), although the first stanza of the poem insists on evoking that urban landscape purely to leave it behind in wandering: "I have outwalked the furthest city light" (Frost 255, l
I would like to examine "Acquainted with the Night," taking each stanza individually to show how Frost's literary art manages to construct a universal-seeming situation out of naturalistic description. Deirdre Fagan notes that Frost's narrator in "Acquainted with the Night" is "uncharacteristically urban" (Fagan 22), although the first stanza of the poem insists on evoking that urban landscape purely to leave it behind in wandering: "I have outwalked the furthest city light" (Frost 255, l
For now it is enough to note that the anaphora is used as a structural principle here, and it brings in a somnolent or dreamy quality to the poet's narration here. The events described here could just as easily be a sort of dream-vision of the sort Dante invented terza rima to narrate: although it may seem strange to compare one of the great epic poems to Frost's considerably humbler sonnet, Richard Poirier argues (agreeing with both Jarrell and Brower, who had earlier discussed the indebtedness) that "Acquainted with the Night" is a poem that "links Frost with Dante" (Poirier 241)
One of those techniques involved looked at a natural object as an "emblem" of some deeper meaning. (Bagby, p
There are two kinds of sonnets: Italian, which include two stanzas of eight (octave) and six (sestet) lines respectively; and the English or Shakespearean, which includes three stanzas of four lines each, known as quartrains, and a couplet. (Burt & Mickics, p
The poem was first published in a collection entitled, American Poetry 1922: A Miscellaney. (Cramer, p
Darwin's ideas challenged the belief that there were eternal moral truths which always and everywhere characterized human experience. (Hass, pp