DEATH:

The poem accounts for the unfortunate death of a poor man, who dies helplessly at his master’s farm.
The poem begins with the conversation of a rural couple; the wife, Mary, tells her husband, Warren,
that their ex-worker has returned, asking for forgiveness.

“When was I ever anything but kind to him?

But I’ll not have the fellow back,’ he said.
‘I told him so last haying, didn’t I?
If he left then, I said, that ended it.”

Mary wants her husband to forgive the poor farmhand, whereas Warren does not want to take him
back, as he always has disappointed them. Mary constantly tries to convince her husband, saying Silas is
in a miserable stat and has come to us to die. Since Warren has not seen Silas during his illness, he is still
angry over the commitment Silas broke in the past. He simply does not want to give him a second
chance to a man who has already broken his trust. The lady, on the other hand, does not give up, and
eventually convinces her husband to take the poor man in. Unfortunately, when Warren goes to receive
Silas, he is already dead. The poet wants to convey that one should forgive others in time.

FORGIVENESS:

There are many critics that have analyzed and agreed that the theme that Robert Frost presents in his
poem "The Death of the Hired Man" is that people need to be forgiven and accepted before it is too
late. This means that Warren and Mary are having a conversation in which Mary attempts to convince
her husband to see that their farm is the only "home" that Silas has and that in the end he wasn't such a
bad guy, so then Warren needs forgive him and accept him into their home with open and loving arms.

The attitude that Warren has toward the idea of Silas claiming their home and their farm as his one and
only "home" even when he has a very wealthy brother who happens to live thirteen miles down the
road is that he believes that

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in,"

and for this reason he believes that their home should not be claimed by Silas as his "home" for that
very reason .

Mary acquires a maternal nurturing figure with Silas and that is why she forgives and accepts him more
readily than her husband because he takes on a fatherly role and sees Silas as a son that has chosen a
relatively dissolute life and not learned a single lesson or moral from him through all the years that he
has employed him. This also correlates with the allusion that Frost attempts to show in his poem
because Mary shares the same role that the father in the parable does when he accepts his "lost" son
with open and loving arms back into his life and his home. The evidence that critics have found in the
poem to support the theme of how there is a need for people to accept and forgive others before it is
too late, Robert Frost supports this more thoroughly through structural, poetic and metrical devices that
come directly from the poem and he uses them specifically to help show the theme of his poem "The
Death of the Hired Man".