Robert Frost Research Paper

Robert Frost, famous for his poems about nature, was a New England poet and farmer. Living and owning his own farm gave Frost firsthand experience with the life of a farmer and the struggles that came with it. From harvesting the crops to staying warm in the winter, Frost new the hardships a farmer would face. Frost often wrote about nature and work, believing the two to coincide. According to Nina Baym, general editor of The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Frost used complex “diction, colloquial rhythms, and the simplicity of his images to make his poems look natural and unplanned” (230). Through the use of nature lyrics, Frost was either “commenting on a scene or event” or making a comparison between “the outer scene and the psyche”

At the age of eleven, Frost’s father died and as a result the family moved to New England. Three years after graduating from Lawrence, Massachusetts high school in 1893, Frost would marry Elinor White. Together they would have four children and Frost would purchase a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Although Frost was born in California, he identified with the working farmers of New England. Despite his best efforts, Frost’s attempts at farming failed and Frost and his family left for a “new start” in England (Baym 230). Frost flourished in England and began to improve on his poetry. He would then publish his first book, A Boy’s Will (1913) in 1913. His initial success led to the publishing of his second book, North of Boston (1914) in the United States where American editors helped spread Frost to the American market. Sales and praise for North of Boston were high, which persuaded Frost to return to the New Hampshire and reattempt farming. Despite his financial success, Frost’s son committed suicide and his daughter had a mental breakdown (Baym 230)*. As stated by Jay Parini, an American writer and academic, in Robert Frost and the Poetry of Survival, Frost understood the significant of “symbolism and how it functions in a poem.” Parini claims Frost described himself as a “Synecdochist;” a synecdoche is a “figure of speech which uses a part for the whole or whole for the part, or the special for the general or the general for

The poem itself is an extended metaphor for one’s life with the possibilities available and the missed opportunities. In the beginning, the speaker is balanced between “heaven and earth on the ladder” (Ball)*. The speaker stands perched at a ladder pointing “toward heaven still,” except the speaker still has “a barrel that [he] didn’t fill” (Frost 240). The unfilled barrel symbolizes the tasks the speaker was not able to complete in time before death, but the speaker is tired of life, apple-picking, “but I am done with apple-picking now” (Frost 240). Jay Parini explains the true meaning of the poem is not apple-picking, but rather “the feeling that follows from it.” Once the speaker has completed his harvest, he is still haunted by the “scent of apples” and “magnified apples” inside his dreams (Frost 240). After a long harvest and the rigorous work that comes with it, the speaker is exhausted mentally and physically. He then enters a “peculiar dream state” where he is followed by more than apples, but an eerie sense of disorientation as “ten thousand fruits to touch” are heard in his cellar (Frost 240). The ten thousand apples symbolize the thousands of possibilities offered to the speaker, except readers are reminded of the previously unfilled barrel and “two or three” unpicked apples (Frost 240). After the exhaustion of a long harvest,