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 on a 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
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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 modem 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 favour 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 modem life, as well as foster a sense of the visual that is so
important to some groups of modernists like the irnagists (who favourably
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 modem life. He argues that it provides him with a point of
view.
Frost uses pastoral technique only to evaluate and comment on