Robert Frost "In Neglect" an

Robert Frost "In Neglect" An Analysis of Frost's "In Neglect" The speaker, narrator, or voice of the poem may be said to belong to that of a boy (especially when one considers that Frost's poem "In Neglect" first appeared in a collected work of poetry titled "A Boy's Will").

It is apparent, however, from the lines that the speaker is a child who has been punished by being sent to the corner of the classroom, where misbehaving youths are often sent: "we sit sometimes in the wayside nook" -- nook being a cranny or corner and wayside referring to their having fallen off the proper course.

Still, the speaker has a very poetic and profound way of looking at himself, the way the others perceive him, and what he is expected to feel from his punishment (as though he were "forsaken"). His tone of voice may be compared to a mischievous boy I knew in school, who had no fear of silly punishments the teacher would inflict upon him and who was moreover fully aware that school itself was hardly something that needed to be taken so seriously.

To me, he had transcended the letter of the law and risen to a comprehension of the spirit -- and in that comprehension had revolted against the letter, which shocked our teachers, but which gratified him. The same gratification may be found in this poem: "we sit…with mischievous, vagrant, seraphic look," an indication that the troublesome boys switch between looking like trouble and looking like angels, and the line, "And try if we cannot feel forsaken," which indicates that they are willing to play the game.

The addressee may be said to be a friend or confidante. It must be someone in whom the boy is not afraid to divulge his thoughts and feelings. This is not a poem of boasting or of attention-seeking: it is an attempt to indict the authorities who "leave us so to the way we took," meaning that the authorities (by sending them to the corner, the "wayside nook") have washed their hands of them and sent them away from the others.

It is clear that the boy believes the teachers had expected more of them and have now demonstrated that they were "mistaken." The addressee actually reminds me of myself, of my relation to the mischievous boy in my school.

But I was never sent to the corner or punished with the boy in my school, and the addressee in this poem is most likely the other boy who has been punished and with the speaker been sent to "the wayside nook." After all the speaker refers to "us," so it must be that the addressee is his partner in crime, so to speak. The tone of the speaker ranges from honest assessment to ironic and humorous revelation.

The tone of honesty is heard in the first half of the poem, as the speaker considers not his own actions but those of the teacher (and places the greater fault on the authority, who he feels has "left" them). The tone becomes ironic in the end as the speaker hints at the fact that he knows the gravity of their situation is not.