Coleman Rohde

9/16/21

Home Burial by Robert Frost

Frost uses alliteration in combination with anaphora as well as juxtaposition in order to

illustrate what Frost identifies as a largely inseparable emotional and social barrier between Men

and Women. Frost uses alliteration in combination with anaphora in order to highlight

characteristics of the wife’s speech as well as to elicit negative emotions in the reader in the

context of the home burial. For example, the wife states that, “... you that dug / … - his little

grave; / … / Making the gravel leap and leap in air, / Leap up, like that, like that, and land so

lightly” The wife makes extensive use of alliteration through repetition of words that begin with

“l” and she also uses anaphora, repeating phrases such as “like that”. This highlights the

disturbed and distraught tone of voice of the wife which almost carries itself in a nervous

manner. The use of alliteration, usually being associated with positive things, is being associated

with negative aspects of the story such as the home burial. Through repetition of this technique

the reader almost learns to associate alliteration with the negative tirades of the wife. Thus

alliteration and anaphora help to characterize what Frost identifies as the speech patterns of

women during emotional events as almost poetic and with more feeling.

Frost also uses juxtaposition, placing the dialogue of the husband in close proximity to

the dialogue of the wife, in order to demonstrate what he identifies as an inherent difference in

the communicative patterns of men and women. For example the husband states that “You make

me angry. I’ll come down to you. / God, what a woman! … ” Throughout much of the husbands

dialogue in the latter third of the text alliteration and anaphora are much less common than in the

wife’s dialogue. Although the husband uses alliteration and anaphora in the first third, when he
reveals his emotions of anger, it is almost completely absent. Much of this angry dialogue by the

husband is also swiftly followed by dialogue by the women juxtaposing the two speech patterns

of both. Although both are clearly angry in much of the dialogue, the wife still continues to use

anaphora and alliteration more extensively highlighting how Frost thinks women almost speak

with more feeling than men. The man’s dialogue, on the other hand, occurs in shorter, more

precise, bursts of emotion rather than a tirade of justification. The man’s emotions of anger Frost

thus views as less rational than the women’s.

Ultimately this connects to A Doll’s House and Their Eyes Were Watching God. In both

stories women are separated into separate social spheres for women but eventually find some sort

of peace by exiting those spheres in order to engage in socialization with less boundaries

governed by gender. For example, Logan Killicks and Joe Starks, Janie's first two husbands, both

place her in duties of which they consider women’s work like cooking while Killicks farms or

running the store while Starks runs the town. When Tea Cake comes along, on the other hand,

the partnership is more mutual and there is less separation into distinct spheres of work or

socialization based on gender. Similarly, in A Doll’s House Nora leaves Torvald in the end to

seek a life with more independence in which she does not have to deal with the spheres separated

by gender which are imposed by Torvald and much of the Patriarchy. However, in a home burial,

Frost is asserting that it is virtually impossible to eradicate these barriers of socialization which

produce these spheres of socialization because there are inherent differences between men and

women. The husband and wife are frustrated because they can’t understand each other. The

husband mostly understands emotion through anger whereas the wife mostly understands

emotion through grief.