Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Home Burial is one of my favorite Robert Frost poems that we discussed in class. I am not really a big fan of poems, but this poem stood out to me because it wasn’t like the rest, it tells a story. It doesn’t just rhyme and talk about nature. It tells of a real life struggle that many people have to go through. This is a dramatic poem—“dramatic” in that, like traditional drama; it presents a continuous scene and employs primarily dialogue rather than narrative or description( http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section4.rhtml).  The poem to me represents grief and how two people view grief. The wife’s grief infuses every part of her and does not wane with time. The wife can’t move on and everyday grieves the loss of her son. She sits at the top of the stairs and stares at the child’s grave every day. The husband, on the other hand, has accepted the death. He did grieve, but the outward indications of his grief were quite different from those of his wife. He threw himself into the horrible task of digging his child’s grave—into physical work. Both do not understand each other’s grieving process. To the wife, the act of burying the child was one of supreme indifference, while to him it must have been hard. The husband is also partially to blame. If he had any understanding of how to communicate to her, he would not leave everything unspoken. This displays a lack of empathy and a failure of communication. This is typical of men and women. Women outwardly show their emotions and become depressed or sick. Men try to cover up their emotions by going on with life like nothing happened.

This was a great poem that showed the struggles of losing a child, and how it can put a strain on marriage.

This video shows a couple in cousneling protarying the couple in Home Burial.