ROBERT F

ROST

AMER

MAH

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OD

YO

US A F

GO

V T. I S

L AMI A

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L L EGE C

I VI L

L I NE S L

AHO

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5 WORDS THAT DESCRIBE ROBERT FROST?

American, Inspiring, True, Pure, Hero

 literary devices were used in Acquainted with the Night by Robert Frost

he uses repetition. the fact that half of the lines begin with "I

have." He also uses caesura, which is a natural

pause or break, in line two of the poem.

He also uses rhyme, which is a pattern of words that contains similar sounds, but breaks this near the end of his own poem. 

He also uses symbol, which is using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning. 

the night represents more than just the night. 

 He also uses enjambment, which is a continuation of thought in several lines of poetry.

During the entire poem, he uses these regular every day objects, but writes it with deep, sincere meaning that we are suppose to recognize.

After Apple-Picking

Acquainted with the Night

The Aim Was Song

An Old Man's Winter Night

The Armful

Asking for Roses

The Bear

Bereft

Birches

The Black Cottage

Bond and Free

A Boundless Moment

A Brook in the City

• But Outer Space• Choose Something • Like a Star• A Cliff Dwelling• The Code• Come In• A Considerable Speck• The Cow in Apple-Time

A Dream Pang

Dust of Snow

The Egg and the Machine

Evening in a Sugar Orchard

The Exposed Nest

The Fear

Fire and Ice (1916)

Fireflies in the Garden

The Flower Boat

Flower-Gathering

For Once, Then Something

Fragmentary Blue

Gathering Leaves

The Generations of Men

Ghost House

The Gift Outright

A Girl's Garden

Going for Water

Good Hours

Good-bye, and Keep Cold

The Gum-Gatherer

A Hundred Collars

Hannibal

The Hill Wife

Home Burial

Hyla Brook

In a Disused Graveyard

In a Poem

In Hardwood Groves

In Neglect

In White (Frost's Early Version of "Design")

Into My Own

A Late Walk

Leaves Compared with Flowers

The Line-Gang

A Line-Storm Song

The Lockless Door

Love and a Question

Lure of the West

Meeting and Passing

Mending Wall

A Minor Bird

The Mountain

Mowing

My Butterfly

My November Guest

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

Neither Out Far Nor in Deep

Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same

Not to Keep

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Now Close the Windows

October

On a Tree Fallen across the Road

On Looking up by Chance at the Constellations

Once by the Pacific (1916)

One Step Backward Taken

Out, Out- (1916)

The Oven Bird

Pan With Us

A Patch of Old Snow

The Pasture

Plowmen

A Prayer in Spring

Provide, Provide

Putting in the Seed

Quandary

A Question

Range-Finding

Reluctance

Revelation

The Road Not Taken

The Road That Lost its Reason

The Rose Family

Rose Pogonias

The Runaway

The Secret Sits

The Self-Seeker

A Servant to Servants

They Were Welcome to Their Belief

A Time to Talk

To E.T.

To Earthward

To the Thawing Wind

Tree at My Window

The Silken Tent

A Soldier

The Sound of the Trees

The Span of Life

Spring Pools

The Star-Splitter

Stars

The Trial by Existence

The Tuft of Flowers

Two Look at Two

Two Tramps in Mud Time

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Storm Fear

The Telephone

The Vanishing Red

The Vantage Point

War Thoughts at Home

What Fifty Said

The Witch of Cos

The Wood-Pile

AFTER APPLE PICKING

The speaker feels bad for the apples that have touched the ground and are consequently smushed up to make juice instead. This attitude suggests that he might feel bad for the human race as a whole, which often aims for lofty spiritual goals, only to get bruised – or worse – by earthly flaws. Frost seems to have absorbed the sin-haunted mentality of New England, present from the Puritans onward, but he also pushes back against it subtly.

• The theme of the poem 'After the Apple Picking' is symbolic. It is known as a very metaphorical poem.

it presents us with an experience in which the world of normal consciousness and the world that lies beyond it meet and mingle. 'I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight', says the narrator, and this strangeness, the 'essence of winter sleep', is something he shares with the reader. The dreamy confusion of the rhythm, the curiously 'echoing' effect of the irregular, unpredictable rhyme scheme, the mixing of tenses, tones, and senses, the hypnotic repetition of sensory detail: all these things promote a transformation of reality that comes, paradoxically, from a close observation of the real, its shape, weight, and fragrance, rather than any attempt to soar above it

Magnified apples appear and disappear,Stem end and blossom end,And every fleck of russet showing clear.My instep arch not only keeps the ache,It keeps the pressure of the ladder-round.I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.And I keep hearing from the cellar binThe rumbling soundOf load on load of apples coming in.

"After Apple-Picking" has often been compared to Keats’ "Ode to Autumn," as if it were primarily a celebration of harvest. But its elevated diction as well as its images, mood and theme, all suggest a greater affinity with Keats' :Ode to a Nightingale." In that weary, drowsy poem the speaker longs to escape through art, symbolized by the nightingale, from the pain of the real world and wants to melt into the welcome oblivion of death:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsMy sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drainsOne minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk,- john keats

Frost's narrator, standing on the earth but looking upward, is also suspended between the real and the dream world

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a treeToward heaven stillAnd there's a barrel that I didn't fill.

The long and short lines, the irregular rhyme scheme, the recurrent participles (indicating work), the slow tempo and incantatory rhythm all suggest that repetitive labor has drained away his energy. The perfume of the apples - equated through "essence" with profound rest - has the narcotic, almost sensual effect of ether. Frost's speaker, like Keats', is suffused with drowsy numbness, yet enters the visionary state necessary to artistic creation:

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.I cannot rub the strangeness from my sightI got from looking through a pane of glassI skimmed this morning from the drinking trough.

The glassy piece of ice - which distorts, transforms and makes the familiar seem strange - is, like Keats' nightingale, a symbol of art. In his dream state (the word "sleep" occurs six times in the poem), and he rhythmically sways on the ladder when the boughs bend with his weight:

Magnified apples appear and disappear,Stem end and blossom end,And every fleck of russet showing clear,

As the apples are gathered - and the poem written - he becomes both physically and mentally exhausted:

For I have had too muchOf apple-picking: I am overtiredOf the great harvest I myself desired.

He needs to regenerate himself, like the hibernating woodchuck, by a long, deathlike winter sleep, so he will be ready to reenter the poet's dream world and achieve another spurt of creativity. In "After Apple-Picking" Robert Frost achieves a perfect fusion of pastoral and poetic labor.

(1)Boy’s Will (1913) (2) North of Boston (1914) (3) Mountain Interval(1916) (4) New Hampshire (1923) (5) West Running Brook (1928) (6) A Further Range (1936) (7) A Witness Tree (1942) ( 8) Steeple Bush (9) Two Masques (1945) (10) In the Clearing (1962) 

Nature is a so wide spread in his poems that we feel we are roaming with Wordsworth but without any supernatural mysticism of the Romantics. Nature in its real and practical sense can be viewed in Frost’s poems: 

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. (Desert Places) 

• My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) 

But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless wing a bewildered butterfly. (The Tuft of Flowers) 

His simplicity needs no shackles to sustain itself because truth is ever green.

She turned and sank upon her skirt at that, And her face changed from terrified to dull. (Home Burial) 

• The bear puts both arms around the tree above her And draws it down as if it were a lover (The Bear) 

• Out of the mud two strangers came And caught me splitting wood in the yard. (Two Tramps in Mud Time) 

Frost is always with humanity as a whole, not in pieces and portions: He hates to see a boy the fool of books. (The Death of the Hired Man) Off he goes always when I need him most. (Mending Wall) 

• We’ll both be married to the brook. (West-Running Brook) 

• ” Good fences make good neighbours; (Mending Wall) 

Robert Frost has a balanced philosophy of life. He is neither a pessimist to see darkness all around nor an optimistic fool who fails to understand the practical and realistic sense of life and nature.

Though sometimes he is frightened by nature yet he enjoys it his fill.

About social life also he remains a practical thinker who bases every experience on some or the other cause. This philosophy is at the same time modern and scientific and at the same time not non-relogious. 

• Some say the world will end in fire Some say in ice. (Fire and Ice) 

• Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, (Mending Wall) 

• The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to before I sleep. (Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening) 

Thus his philosophy is based on rationality not on any ununderstandable mysticism. 

• Frost loves man, he thinks about man and he talk with man.

• He is against the artificial divisions that force man cut his brother’s throat.

• A poet of nature and man can never be narrow minded or limited in his approach .

• At the same time, he does not allow to let loose the reins of morality and good behaviour. 

“It was to the poets in particular that men turned for a redefining of their plave in the cosmic scheme of things. What they found was a diversity of minds and spirits __ all eager to defend. The cause of beauty and truth against the ugliness of industrilism and commercialism so 

• prevalent in England.” The universal cataract of death That sepends to nothingness (West-Running Brook) Our life runs down in sending up the clock. (West-Running Brook) 

• Imagery grants poetry a pleasing flavor and • Frost is not unaware of it. He uses images in his poems so

artistically that we feel some liking for forest or other objects of universe.

• It is the expertness of a narrator that he does not reject the low beings rather mentions them to make his poetry realistic and natural. Some instances can be quoted from Frost’s poems: 

• But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. (Come In) 

• A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them. (The Onset) 

• The butterfly and I had lit upon, Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, That made me hear the wakening birds around, And hear his long say the whispering to the ground. (The Tuft of Flowers) 

• Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep . (After Apple-Picking) 

• Irony, the salt of narration, makes almost everything tasty, impressive and praiseworthy. Frost makes a skillful use of this weapon of writing . His poems are replete with ironic senses: 

• Something there is that doesn’t love a wall (Mending Wall) 

• The loneliness included me unawares (Desert Places)

•   I’d like to get away from earth a while And then come back to it and begin over. (Birches) 

• Irony distinguishes one thing from others: • I took the one less traveled by, 

And that has made all the difference; (The Road Not Taken) 

• Irony makes the situation dramatic; • Magnified apples appear and disappear, 

(After Apple-Picking) • Irony exposes the base of somebody’s behaviour • He will not go behind his father’s saying. 

(Mending Wall) • Irony explains some idea: • Men work together, I told him from the heart, 

Whether they work together or apart; (The Tuft of Flowers) 

• The use of devices like pathetic fallacy, similes and metaphors embellish writings if they are used properly.

• Sublimity can’t be achieved with out the impressive application of these tricks.

• And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground. (Pathetic fallacy)( The Tuft of Flowers)

•  My little horse thinks it queer (Transferred epithet)( Stopping by Woods) 

• Well, those days trouble Silas like a dream. (Simile) (The Death of the Hired Man) 

• That brought him to that creaking room was age. [ Transferred Ephithet] (An old Man’s winter Night) 

• His all pine and I am apple orchard . [Metaphor] (Mending Wall)

•  Nevertheless, a message from the dawn (The Tuft of Flowers)

•  I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. [Alliteration] (Home Burial) 

• The first reading of most of his poems puts us to delusion that he is a local poet. He often moves about in his New England and searches out the subject of his poems .

• But a second and deeper reading brings the fact before us that he is a poet of all the world and of all times.

• In ‘Stopping by Woods…. the traveller, the poet himself, is in fact every man of the world; the night is the time of life ; the horse is consciousness, destination is the end of life.

• The charm of the simple poem becomes a symbol of life and this quality makes the poet a universal one. 

• In ‘After Apple Picking’ the picker is the every man of the world, apples are desires ,barrel is the greed of man, Ice-block is man’s life, hoary grass is this world, etc.

• “The Road Not Taken” indicates those people who don’t follow the beaten rut but create something new- often the great revolutionaries turn the tables, great scholars propound new theories , great leaders make the fortune of a nation and convert slaves into masters.

• Frost has behaved exceptionally while treating the theme of Love: • Something these is that doesn’t love a wall 

(Mending Wall) • Earth’s the right place for love: 

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. (Birches) 

• Only where love and need are one, And the work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and Future’s sakes. (Two Tramps in Mud Time) 

• He is alone

• in jumping on birches,

• in apple picking

• in Desert Places,

• in the Road Not Taken,

• in the Tuft of Flowers, etc.

• This loneliness has been the theme of the universe. Most of the stars are in loneliness. Man is alone in grave also. Thus loneliness in poetry makes it universal. 

• Frost’s poetry has the characteristic of lyricism.

• his simplicity is called deceptive.

• This simplicity and sharpness reminds us of Geoffrey Chaucer: 

• Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice (Fire and Ice) 

• I went to turn the grass once after one Who mowed it in the dew before the sun. (The Tuft of Flowers) 

Snow falling and night falling fast , oh, fast In a field I looked into going past. (Desert Places) 

• In some poems, we find some sense of fear . This fear is also not baseless because in nature fear is always hovering on human beings.

• This sense of fear makes Frost ‘s poetry more realistic. Without fear, the balance of the universe will be disturbed; the same will happen without hope. 

• I advocate a semi- revolution The trouble with a total revolution (A Semi Revolution) 

• I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. (Desert Places)