Coleman Rohde

9/1/21

Reluctance

Frost uses imagery, symbolism, and rhyme scheme in order to paint a powerful argument

that we must not give into the inevitable even if it is pointless. Imagery and Symbolism serve to

establish relationships between the reader and the real-life situations that they will inevitably

encounter. For example, Frost states that “I have climbed the hills of view / And looked at the

world, and descended; / I have come by the highway home, / And lo, it is ended.” Frost uses

imagery to establish a picture of someone coming over a hill towards home towards some sort of

end to a journey. The phrase “over the hill” is taken to often mean that someone is close to their

inevitable death. Thus the hill symbolizes death. Many of the words in the lines like “ended” and

“descended” also have negative connotations which evokes negative feelings within the reader

which are especially disappointing given that the lines are placed at the beginning of the poem.

In effect, Frost is making the argument that the inevitability of death, which everyone must face,

is disappointing and that to give into it also brings no more than disappointment. Frost also states

that, “Ah, when to the heart of man / Was it ever less than a treason / To go with the drift of

things, / To… / … bow and accept the end / Of a love or a season?” Frost uses imagery to relate

the act of bowing with accepting the end “of a love”. The end of a “love” or a relationship, like

death, is something that everyone will inevitably experience in their lives. Bow carries with it a

negative connotation because it signals a quiet submission. Thus, Frost is asserting that to accept

the inevitable acts of life with quiet submission is pitiful and inhuman as it goes against the heart.

The rhyme scheme is also representative of the message of reluctance which Frost

conveys. For example, Frost states that “The leaves are all dead on the ground, / Save those that
the oak is keeping / To ravel them one by one / And let them go scraping and creeping / Out over

the crusted snow / When others are sleeping.” The rhyme scheme first presents itself as a blank-

verse tetrameter in the first three sentences, then almost like a couplet split into four lines by the

fourth sentence, and, by the sixth sentence, a tercet. Much like how one is often unwilling to go

quietly with the “end of a love or a season”, going with their heart, the reader is themselves

reluctant to accept the confusing rhyme scheme, against reason, which becomes an inevitability

as the poem continues in the tercet-like structure. Thus the reader is almost instructed by the

rhyme scheme alone that they must be reluctant to accept things which seem inevitable.