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Robert Frost English Literature Essay

Frost Home Frost's Sense of Home

Robert Frost is one of the most prominent American poets of the twentieth century, with poems that manage to evoke elegance and wisdom while remaining earthy and true to the straightforward American character at the same time. At the same time, there is often a sense of seeming directionless and uncertain, which is of course the flipside of the freedom and self-determination of the American way. Tracing these elements in Frost's poetry leads to the recognition of a certain recurrent theme: the sense of home and belonging, often represented through its lacking. That is, Frost is able to evoke a clear sense of the feeling of "home" in certain poems, while at other times he uses...

The following paragraphs will examine how Frost is able to accomplish this through his use of nature imagery.
"Design" is a poem in which Frost manages both to create a sense of home and a sense of strangeness. He describes a spider that has caught a moth as, "Assorted characters of death and blight / Mixed ready to begin the morning right" (lines 4-5). Beginning the morning right (which could also be heard aloud as "morning rite") gives the scene a sense of familiarity -- this is how mornings start, for a fortunate spider and an unfortunate moth -- yet at the same time they create a blight and a strange upsetting vision for the speaker of the poem. "Fire and Ice" explores this same dichotomy in a more abstract sense. The opening lines of the poem, "Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice," discusses the very un-home-like destruction of the world with images and a meter and tone that…

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