Home Burial

Hello Friend, I was really missing Robert Frost [heh heh], so today’s post is going to revolve around an excellent poem of his: Home Burial. It’s not a very well-known poem at all—in fact, it’s pretty obscure, and if I hadn’t had to study it, I probably wouldn’t have known of it either. This poem is seriously slept on, though. It’s not everyone’s up of tea—it’s an extremely dark, morbid, sad poem, full of pain and bitterness and sorrow [the title is Home Burial, after all]. It’s one of Frost’s longest poems and has been written in a narrative style, with no rhyming scheme; in this sense, it can be compared to his other narrative poems, such as  The Death of the Hired Man and  The Black Cottage. [If you’ve read my post on Robert Frost’s themes and poetic devices, you’ll remember that I’ve mentioned Home Burial in it.] I really love how this poem explores an extremely tense conversation between a couple who have lost their baby not long ago. They have different ways of coping with their loss [ I’ll explain in detail soon]; each misunderstands the other, leading to a massive rift between them. Home Burial symbolises two deaths—the death of a child and the “death” of a marriage. The two characters of this poem are both very complex, and the readers can clearly see and interpret the poem through their eyes. Their clashing view-points make this poem extremely interesting [I cried a little after I read it the first time. That’s how good this poem is.] Best of all, it has an ambiguous ending! I love it when Frost just puts his pen down and leaves the readers to figure out the conclusion themselves!

As the poem opens, the wife is seen standing at the top of a staircase, mournfully gazing at her child’s grave through a window. Her husband, standing at the bottom of the stairs, does not immediately realise what she is looking at and questions her; she is distraught as what she sees as his “apathy”; and rejects his attempts to communicate with and reach out to her.  She verbally lashes out at him, and attempts to leave the house; he pleads with her to stay, asking her to talk to him and lighten her weight by confiding in him. He does not understand what it is he does that offends her or why she should grieve outwardly, even though it has been a while since they lost their child. For her part, she cannot understand his composure, and resents him for it: “Friends make pretense of following to the grave, but before one is in it, their minds are turned and making the best of their way back to life and living people, and things they understand. But the world’s evil.” She’d rather denounce the world than accept the fact that her grief is crippling her; she can’t keep mourning forever, though of course her loss is irreparable. A part of her realises, however unconsciously, that her grief is devastating and impractical; she does not want to admit this, though. This outward display of her unbearable sorrow is the only way she can deal with her loss. She does not want to return to the “world of the living”; she doesn’t want to return to life, she doesn’t want to be a “false friend”. She is clearly extremely emotionally unstable, and though her husband insists that talking to him will relieve her somewhat, she does not believe in the power of communication as much as he does.

The husband, on the other hand, has a very different way of coping with his grief. It’s his loss as much as hers.  However, in his case, there’s no outward display of grief; being a farmer, he chooses to find solace by immersing himself in his work. His wife berated him for digging his child’s grave with his own hands; she took it as another example of his callous unconcern.  But you, dear reader, know that’s not the case, don’t you? She did not understand his way of dealing with it, of keeping his pain hidden and bottled up… it’s really sad how these two just don’t get each other. Digging that grave was something he wanted to do for his child, rather than simply handing over the unpleasant task to someone else. It was a form of service for the baby. He’s a farmer—he has a very pragmatic, grimly philosophical ideology, with the cycles that make up a farmer’s life, and an organic view of life and death. At the end of the poem, the wife, who has worked herself up into a mighty temper, storms past him and out the door, while he calls after her and threatens to bring her back by force, leaving the readers to wonder what happens next; it’s really quite open to interpretation, isn’t it? Their shared sorrow should’ve brought them closer, but it just drove a wedge between them—and both of them are at fault. The man does try to understand his wife to some degree, but soon gives up and becomes confrontational towards the end.

You know, dear reader, there’s a subtle power struggle in this poem. I didn’t realise it the first time I read it, because it’s so unobtrusive at first glance; but when I re-read it, I picked up on it pretty fast.  At the beginning of the poem, the woman is standing at the top of the staircase and the man is standing by the door, between her and freedom. She’s basically trapped. Initially, the man uses this to his advantage, advancing on her until she cowers under him; however, a swift role reversal is noted when during their highly charged and heated exchange, the woman rapidly regains her courage and slips past the man, going up to the doorway and intimidating him with just a look: “she turned upon him such a daunting look that he said twice over before he knew himself, “Can’t a man speak of his own child that he’s lost?” Woah—cowering under him and then frightening him half out of his wits with just a glance! You go, girl! Now that she’s close to the door and the man is at the top of the staircase, power has passed from his hands to hers.  I bet you weren’t expecting her to have the hand in this power struggle so soon! At the end of the poem it is seen that she has achieved the freedom she so badly wanted; she has thrown the door open and exited the house, and it is implied that her husband’s threats are futile.

Isn’t this an extremely interesting poem? I hope my post has done it justice!

That’s all for now. See you next time!

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