Friday, March 2, 2012

Robert Frost's "Desert Places"

Robert Frost's "Desert Places" is a poem that truly deals with the complexities of nature.  The contrasting ideologies within the poem are meant to heighten one's perceptions as to what is nature and what is man's part in controlling the land and the universe.  Plus these contrasts are used to help man understand where the feeling of nothingness really comes from.

In the first stanza, Frost uses "snow falling" and "night falling" to heighten one's perception.  It is essential that the light from the snow falling shows the darkness descending on the land.  It sets up this eerie perception, because the light from the snow is not enough to truly see the world.  Also in this stanza we have a "field," but it is not a natural field because the field has "weeds" and "stubble" coming up, which means that it is man made or a cultivated field.  These two contrasts of "weeds" and "stubble" show how nature will reclaim that which man has taken over. 

In the second stanza we get animals being "smothered in their lairs" and "absent-spirited" which are meant to signify the concept of death and that one is lonely and not in touch with nature. 

The third stanza repeats the concept of "lonely."  This lonely and loneliness adds to the dark feeling of the poem and how one is out of touch with the natural world, which means too that they are out of touch with themselves. This stanza also has the snow annihilating everything, "A blanker whiteness of benighted snow," which almost completes this feeling of nothingness that is throughout the poem.

The final stanza tells what truly scares man.  It is not the field with weeds and stubble, nor is it the loneliness that is felt throughout the piece.  It is the emptiness of meaning that scares man and this is not found out in nature, but it is in man's mind and that is where true fear comes from.

The poem is quite dark, but I think that his idea was to show that the world is not a lonely place, but the loneliness is within each person and unless one can find meaning to their life, they will live in fear of never finding their true purpose. 

AmyN

Work Cited
Frost, Robert. "Desert Places." The Bedford Anthology. 1934/1969. P. 594. Print

2 comments:

  1. Amy, I like what you're doing with this close attention to the specific words in the poem. I hope you'll bring some of these insights to our discussion next week.

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  2. I liked your conclusion that “loneliness is within each person and unless one can find meaning to their life, they will live in fear of never finding their true purpose”. I agree with it, that we all have the innate loneliness and people need drive past that fear and look for a purpose that drives them to achieve a higher level of human understanding.

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