ALIGARH

MUSLIM UNIVERSITY

Representation of Rural life in Robert

Frost’s Poetry

SUBMITTED BY:

Esha Gotewal
19 ENM -17
GI5113

EOM 3105
American Literature
M.A. IIIrd SEMESTER

SUBMITTED TO:
PROF. SEEMIN HASAN
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Esha Gotewal

Prof. Seemin Hasan

EOM 3105

23 November, 2020

Representation of rural life in Robert Frost poetry

Abstract

This paper intends to bring out the representation of simple and rustic life found in the short

poems of Robert Frost. Poems like “After Apple picking”, “Birches”, “Mending wall” are

taken to comprehend Frost’s capacity in representing the gorgeousness and glooms of rustic

life. Through these poems, he expresses his affinity with native people and farm land. He

represents the necessities of human life through his poems. He explores the relationship

between mankind and nature through the glimpses of rural life and farming communities.

Robert Frost (1874-1963) was the most popular poet of twentieth century. Robert Frost is one

of few poets in English literature that shall never become outdated because poetry is an echo

of every sensitive man’s experiences and his limitations. Frost’s greatness as a pastoral poet

has been universally recognized. Being a farmer nature is his constant companion. His poetry

concerns common folk, farmers, and labourers,. Glorification of rural life of New England

has been a leading characteristics of the poetry of Robert Frost. Frost makes his New

England, the locale of his pastorals, a distinct place and renders truthful but personal

observation of pastoral scenes. It is this rural world that provides him not only with the

setting, but also with the objects, incidents, events, and characters are all from New England,

and his poetry is an account of his characters and habits, as well as various aspects of their

lives and activity, their beliefs, ideals, traditions, and codes of conduct.
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In his poem “After Apple Picking” Frost makes a faithful portrayal of a farmer who is

thoroughly tired and exhausted after his day’s work of apple picking. It symbolises hardships

that everyone encounters in life but beyond that rest is needed to everyone. He enjoyed the

touch, feel and the atmosphere of the orchard. The whole day he has been picked lots of

apples but still few apples are left in the bough of tree. It shows the task is incomplete, but the

tiredness of the whole day work and scents of the apples to make him drowsy. So he wants to

sleep.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

The very title of his poems, After Apple-Picking, Mending Wall, are characteristically rural.

The boy-swinger in Birches, farmers in Mending Wall all are rural characters. The rural

phenomenoa mentioned by Frost are associated with early problems of existence. After

Apple-Picking refers to the work-a-day life of the rural folk.

Mending Wall apparently refers to repairing the wall between two farms. Gaps may be

created in the wall by the frozen-ground-swell spilling the boulders or by the hunters in chase

of their prey. By repairing the wall the farmer is attaining security for himself. But he merely

says that, "Good fences make good neighbours". It also hints the eternal conflict that

interferes with man attaining a perfect brotherhood. The poem presents two neighbours one a

conservative holding stoutly to the opinions and customs of his father, and the other a more

inquiring person who questions the purpose of old customs and traditions. In Birches, there is

the reference to swinging as a pastoral pastime.

In his interpretation of the pastoral, Frost demonstrates a classicist’s devotion to farm and a

realistic interest in experience. He does not idealise the rustic and his life rather he presents
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him as he is with all his instincts and impulses, jealousy, love and hate, with all the sordid

details of the life he leads. Except for the brief period of his stay in England, Frost was

himself a farmer all his life, from early boyhood down to his ripe old age. Poetry was his

vocation, but fanning was his avocation. He combined the two, and this gave him an intimate

knowledge of the life of the farmer, and hence arises the veracity and truthfulness of his

depictions of rural life. His people are always busy with hard work, whether it’s picking

apples, or mending walls. In After Apple Picking, the man who falls asleep, after picking

apples, dreams of nothing but apples. His dream is nothing fantastic, it is expressive of his

pre-occupation with the concerns of real life. However, Frost never forgets for long the

"wearisome condition of humanity", the hardness and bitterness of rural life, as well as of life

elsewhere. Misery, disillusionment and frustration, and emotional isolation are facts, and the

poet does not shut his eyes to these unpleasant aspects of life. His rural world is not a

conventional Arcadia, or a dreamworld, into which one may escape for a time from the

sorrow and suffering of life. Rather, this rural world is a microcosm of the macrocosm, a

symbol and representation of life at large, with its joys and pleasures, but also with its heart-

aches, fever and fret and weariness. It is a world in which hired-men neglected and isolated,

'come home', to die, and in which the death of a tender child leads to quarrels and alienations

between husbands and wives. It is a world in which man lives in a hostile environment and

suffers from severe obstacles. He may occasionally forget the hard reality, and fly into a

realm of fancy, but such flights are only momentary, and the poet is soon back to earth. Earth

is the proper place for him, for love, as well as for work. And it is this realism which imparts

such universal significance and appeal to the poet's treatment of life in New England

countryside. Frost's poetry appeals even to those who are not familiar with New England, are

not interested in New Englanders, only because it deals truthfully with hard facts, facts which

are common to life in all ages and countries.

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Frost's pastoral art is unique. He uses the pastoral tradition, but invents his own method. This

uniqueness of his pastoral art arises from his ability to write of rural life from the point of

view of an actual New England farmer. He does not write from a superior plane, as one who

is above and beyond, but as one who shares the life of the rustic, his thought processes, and

his ways of looking at things. This adoption of the rustic point of view enables him not only

to portray rustic life as it really is in itself, but also to contrast it with the life beyond the

urban life; the complex life lived in the city. The earlier writers of the pastoral constantly

stressed the parallelisms and contrasts between the simple and innocent life in the

countryside, and the more sophisticated and artificial life of the court. Such parallelisms and

contrasts are also provided by Frost by juxtaposing the simple country life, and the complex,

artificial life in the city, so that the one serves as a commentary on the other.

His poem “Birches” talks about the boys, game of swinging on birches. It conveys a certain

childlike innocence and also allows the swinger to escape from the cold rationality of the

earth for a short time and reach into the heaven. Few boys who live far from the town to learn

baseball but he takes birch swinging as a pleasant sport. Through swinging he wants to reach

the world of fancy or to some ideal world where human sorrows are unknown. He is in love

with life and earth, so he wants to back.

“Earth is the right place for love

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better”

The simplicity of Frost's poem may be a reflection of the simplicity of rural life. But it is

deceptive. It is only apparent. In reality, Frost's poems of rural life are highly suggestive and

symbolic. A careful reading reveals layers within layers of meaning and significance, and

many other levels of being are constantly suggested.

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Similarly, Mending Wall tells about one of the regular duties of the farmer is keeping his

stone walls in good order. The wall symbolises all kind of barriers which divide man from

man. It highlights the importance of property and individuality. The poet doesn’t like the wall

but his neighbour believes his ancestors sayings, “Good fences make good neighbours”.

Conclusion

In the depiction of rustic scenes and characters, Frost is undoubtedly a realist. Nature is

presented as it is; with beauty and wilderness. Nature of rustic people also presented as they

are; with the sense of good and bad. Lives of the people in his poems are natural and not

hypocrite like the Urban. Through his poem he conveys that, “One must work, one must do

one’s duty, one must keep one’s promise, and only in such activities that real happiness is to

be found”. Life is significantly more happy and meaningful only in rural areas. Life with

nature and in nature, keeps man more natural and truthful. Thus does the poet suggest values

and ideals which lie much beyond the rural life, and which characterise life on different and

higher planes. The rural world holds the centre of his attention, but it is made to imply and

suggest much more. In short we can say that Frost's universality arises from his study of the

essentials of the human predicament as seen in a rural setting.

References:

Rosenthal, M .L. The Robert Frost Controversy. Nation, June 20, 1959. pdf.

Feggen, Robert. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. United Kingdom: Cambridge

University Press, 2008. Pdf.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/robert_frost.
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