Robert Frost

The "yellow wood" could also mean early spring, no? Echoing in my mind is another poem by Frost, "Nothing God Can Stay": Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a...

"Nothing Gold Can Stay," by Robert Frost, is a poem about the illusory nature of life. This theme, that nothing of value ("nothing gold") will last forever, is substantiated through the imagery of...

According to astronomer Harrow Shapely, the poem Fire and Ice was created due to a conversation he had with Robert Frost. The topic of the end of the world came up and Shapely told Frost that Earth...

Robert Frost's "A Minor Bird" opens with a title which reflects man's inability to appreciate nature. The use of the word "minor" in the title shows the insignificance with which man regards...

In Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," line 8 of the poem mentions that the events of the poem take place on the "darkest evening of the year." There are two possible meanings...

Given that Frost's poem "The Secret Sits" is a simple couplet (two lines of poetry) and written in anapest trimeter (anapest- a meter with a three syllable foot; trimeter- the existence of three...

A critical appreciation is a bit of an odd thing. It is more than simply saying that the poem is good or beautiful. You have to justify that statement by critically analyzing the poem or parts of...

The poem Fireflies in the Garden, by Robert Frost is an allegory to several things including the admiration of effort, the drawbacks of imitation, and the appreciation of differences. The...

Imagery is using the five senses—sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste—to describe a scene. In "Nothing Gold can Stay," Frost uses visual and touch imagery: we can see and feel what he describes....

This poem uses a form of iambic tetrameter, meaning that each line has four "feet." In actuality, what this means is that a person reading the poem aloud would naturally stress four syllables in...

The regular rhythm and simple structure of this poem, based on four-line stanzas, is suited to its topic: the simple activity of shoveling "mountains" of dried leaves. The poem's regularity echoes...

The mood of this poem is contemplative, but it does not have the tone of gentle reflection we might more usually associate with contemplative poetry. On the contrary, the speaker approaches the...

The poem refers to the fact that sometimes beautiful things do not last long. They tend to be evanescent. Gold is of course associated with the precious metal. It is extremely valuable in this...

The tone of the end of the poem is curious and disappointed, and the mood is regretful and thoughtful. Tone is the author’s attitude toward the subject, and the mood is the emotional landscape of...

Three of the many features that are often present in Robert Frost's poems are a) a simple rhyme scheme, b) everyday language, c) multiple symbolic meanings. For example, take the opening stanza...

Robert Frost's poem "Peck of Gold" looks back at his childhood in San Francisco and focuses on the dust that seemingly covered everything. In the poem, he uses the dust as both a symbol of the...

The theme of "Once by the Ocean" is the inevitable passing of time and its slow destruction. There is a heavily foreboding tone established at the outset of the piece. The water and waves "shatter"...

The title is certainly pretty basic, but then, so, in some ways, is the poem itself. I think the appropriateness of the title depends on what you think the poem's message is. Is the poem about a...

At first glance, Robert Frost doesn’t seem to have much in common with the experimental poetry of the Modernist writers; his poetry often relies on traditional forms, rhymes, and blank verse. Frost...

Warren believes that "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." In contrast, Mary calls home "Something you somehow haven't to deserve." Warren looks at...

The "denotation" of a word is the actual, dictionary definition. In the same vein, the "connotation" is the suggestion of the meaning of a word apart from what it explicitly means. By definition,...

The title of the poem reveals the subject. The poet is critiquing the upheaval that the line gang's installation of telegraph and telegram lines is bringing to his once quiet and undisturbed rural...

Perhaps, in his usage of "you" Frost addresses an adult audience in his poem "The Pasture"; he may be inviting his readers to recall the beauty of nature as they peruse his poem. For, as he...

There are all sorts of ways to critically appreciate this poem. You can start by looking at where the poem first appears and what form of poem it is. With just a little digging, I found that...

Robert Frost’s “October” uses both its form and content to depict a moment in time right before fall gives way to winter. Although the poem takes the form of one stanza, it can be roughly split...

[Answers on eNotes are limited by available space.] Poetry analysis includes, among other things, structure and rhyme scheme; meter, which is feet and rhythm; theme, which requires knowing the...

In Robert Frost's "Desert Places," the rhyme scheme is A A B A. A rhyme scheme is what the author uses to create a pattern of rhyme. In this case, Frost sticks to that pattern throughout the poem....

The poem "Going for Water" by Robert Frost is narrated in the first person plural (probably by children). The narrators live in a rural environment and rely on a well for their water. Because the...

Robert Frost is one of the greatest modern poets of American literature. His poems are embedded with thought-provoking symbolism. In the poem "Desert Places," Frost delves into the theme of...

Sound devices are techniques which lend a sense of rhythm to a poem. They include end rhymes, internal rhymes, meter, alliteration, assonance, and consonance, all of which cause emphasis to fall on...

Frost uses personification to describe the "resurrected tree" under which the poem's speaker sits and rests. The speaker identifies the tree using the male pronoun "he" and notes that its position...

Robert Frost builds the power in the poem by using the primary symbol of snow and its related color, white, and then employing the clear contrast of night falling, which is echoed at the end with...

Robert Frost once wrote, "In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life: It goes on." Frost's belief about the continuation of life is reflected in his detailing of nature. This...

Robert Frost's "The Runaway" is a short poem that describes the specific scene of a young horse being first exposed to snow. The horse appears to be running away because he is afraid. The two...

The "glimpses" that the poem refers to are shown to be dazzling and beautiful glimpses of nature that truly point us towards the intense and inspirational beauties of the natural world that our...

Frost begins the poem with a contrast that is precise and man-made, sitting indoors and talking ''of the cold outside." The precarious nature of the warmth and comfort which the subjects of the...

Frost's poem contains one of the most quoted lines in all of poetry; "Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in" (lines 118-119). The idea is that...

This poem, like so many of Frost's poems, takes as its subject the beauty of nature. The title, "A Prayer in Spring," points towards the way in which this poem operates as a simple evocation of the...

Frost plays with several other images in this poem. The idea of taste, and interacting with one's world through sensation is a powerful one. This reflects a notion of experience within the world,...

It is amazing the way in which loneliness occurs as a definite theme in so many of Frost's poems. My own personal favourite is "Acquainted with the Night," as mentioned above, in which the speaker...

The tone or mood of Frost's poem is ominous and threatening, creating a mood of unease or anxiety about the future. Nature is portrayed as planning, with deliberate, evil intent, to harm the...

Both poems make use of nature imagery, as the other educator wrote. In "Nothing Gold Can Stay," "Nature's first green" makes us visualize spring and the explosion of green that occurs when winter...

Robert Frost's poem "A Late Night Walk" is a lyric poem of the variation called ballad. Lyric poems come in several varieties including sonnets and ballads. Each variety of lyric poem has its own...

Amidst the shirred remains of the harvested field, the speaker observes signs of the last remaining days of Autumn that part with the melancholy of the "sober birds" and the leaf that "Comes softly...

Robert Frost's "The Pasture" is a two-stanza poem with a xAAx rhyme scheme, written in iambic pentameter except for the final line of each stanza, which utilizes iambic tetrameter. One example of a...

"The road less traveled by" could symbolize a more unconventional path through life than the "roads" that others typically take. It could relate, for example, to the way one makes a living....

This line employs several different literary techniques. On the surface it is personification, since the frost is given the human-like quality of "lurking," suggesting that it is waiting for a...

In Robert Frost's "Mending Wall," the neighbor thinks it is a good idea to have a fence marking off each man's property so they will definitively know where the borders of their properties lie....

The previous post was quite accurate in suggesting that the entire poem has a strongly negative feel to it. I think the third stanza contains the most imagery that seems negative to me. Much of...

The poem states the mood in the first line: "Mary sat musing..." The poem is not an intense examination of anything, but rather a gentle recollection of a gentle man who has come back to the only...