Milestones Of Robert Frost's Poetry

The Milestones of Frost’s Poetry are Lyrics: Rolfe Humphries has made a deep study of Frost’s lyrics. Enumerating the best-known lyrics of Frost, covering different periods of his poetical creativity, appearing in different selections, Humphries says : ‘There is the fine and beautiful lyric poetry Reluctance in A Boy’s Will; The Road Not Taken, The Sound of the Trees, in Mountain Interval; Fire and Ice, In a Disused Graveyard, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening in New Hampshire; Bereft; Acquainted with the Night in West-Running Brook; Come In in A Further Range; A Nature Note in A Witness Tree – these are not all, only the most conspicuous that can be cited.’ The lyrics of Frost are both short and long and though his shorter pieces are more

What is often found lacking in the lyric poet is the ability to turn outward, to manage the modes of speech as well as those of song, to be dramatic as well as personal. But Frost is a rare exception in this respect. There is no one word like ‘lyric’ which encompasses this aspect of Frost’s excellence. One falters and gropes for words- what shall we say, dramatic monologue, bucolic idyll, epylion, to describe those somewhat longer poems of Frost’s so many of which are so good? The Death of the Hired Man, indeed almost all the poems in North of Boston, Out, Out and Snow in Mountain Interval, the first one missing melodrama, perhaps, only by its terrible brevity and economy. The Witch of Coos in New Hampshire – the only thing that can be said about these poems is that they stand with Chaucer’s and Browning’s, a little less in good cheer and gusto, and a little more in sensitive and reserved

Frost achieves the pinnacle of artistic finesse in Acquainted with the Night. This deeply suggestive lyric is in West-Running Brook. The most interesting thing and the supreme achievement of this poem is its firm and calculated reticence, its insistence on understatement, its refusal to say more than the poet thinks or feels. In this it is typically Frostian, in another sense it is rather uncharacteristic; it shows Frost simply setting a scene and rejecting the opportunity to draw a moral or a conclusive statement from it. The resonance and power of the poem reside entirely in its implication; in the possibilities of interpretation which the poet lay before the reader. It is a non-committal poem but definitely not an indecisive one. The rhyming five-foot lines reflect the poet’s firm thought and his resolve to remain undaunted in a scene of suggestivity. Frost here depicts his negative capability of resting decision among uncertainty and not drawing dogmas too easily out of deeply felt personal experiences. When Frost declares “I have been one acquainted with the night”, he is not lying claim to other men; he is neither making a defiant gesture nor seeking comfort. He is simply describing with immense restraint a mood which is well-known to men and women with sensibility and inquiring