Home burial by Robert Frost

¶ … Frost's "Home Burial"

Tragedy will either bring people together or tear them apart. Robert Frost's poem, "Home Burial," illustrates how tragedy can destroy lives, leaving little room for hope. Frost creates a troubling world in this poem as husband and wife cope with loss, doubt, darkness, and death. This home is plagued with misfortune and a lack of communication proves to make things worse as the couple attempts to grieve the loss of a child. "Home Burial" demonstrates the incredible difficulty involved with loss and the attempt to move on with life.

The personal loss Frost experienced with his own son's death brings this poem and its feelings to life. According to Jay Parini, this gives the poem its emotional pull. Sindey Cox agrees with this notion, writing that the poem was '"close to home, bringing back memories of the death at three and a half of his first born child'" (Cox qtd. In Parini 68). The couple must deal with their loss and with each other's different reactions. They are at odds with one another and she resents him for putting her child in the ground and she does not understand how he can carry on with the daily chore of living. She has given into bitterness against the world, claiming that it is "evil" (Frost 109). Robert Pack maintains that Frost's "overriding perspective" (Pack 104) is to be forever faithful and that includes mourning. Mourning can only succeed, from Frost's point-of-view, if it dissipates itself through it own expression and then allows the griever to return to his or her everyday activities" (104). However, his wife cannot bring herself to mourn so openly. Frost "covered his pain with talking, she with silence" (Parini 69). Lowell claims the emptiness and the horror Unsettle the mother's mid" (Lowell 116). The experience made a "permanent mark" (69) on the poet and commented to a friend that the death of the child created for his wife a '"loss she can't accept from God'" (69). The grief of losing the child is only part of what is occurring in the home.

The aftermath is hopeless and dark. Judith Oster notes that the poem is of such a nature that it represents the real trauma that occurs after a tragic loss. She writes, "Home is only suffocating when the marriage is unhappy" (Oster 300) and that its subject matter is too dramatic and tragic too realistically ties to failure in human love to have poetic form as its principal subject" (300). Richard Poirier claims that this poem is one of Frost's "greatest dramatizations" of the theme of home, in which the husband and wife share the same "pressure" (Richard Poirier 123). Richard Thorton states that Frost's description of this home represents how "unending work distorts grief into callousness" (Thornton 257). The role of the husband is "ambiguous" (123) while he does his best to "comprehend the wife's difficulties, he is only partially able to do so" (124). "The very title of the poem means something about the couple as well as about the dead child buried in the back of the house. It is as if 'home' were a burial plot for all of them" (124). A part of their marriage and their feelings toward each other died, making the home a living tomb.