Analysis of The Road Not Taken by Nature Poet Robert Frost

 

Complete Text of "The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

 

Summery of poem

 

The Road Not Taken is a well- Known poem of Robert Frost. One day the poet was walking alone. Suddenly he stood at point where two road diverged. He was confused which path he would go. He was in a fix. The poet stays sometimes there and thinks that as he is alone it is impossible for him to travel both roads. The poet enjoyed the surrounding place sometimes. According to the poet, One road is grassy where human beings do not move normally. Another road is busy where human beings move easily. The poet chose first one, which is grassy. Robert Frost as a nature poet wants to enjoy the nature and take the adventure of nature. He thinks that his selected one is better than the other as it was little used.

But after going a sort distance he found that there was not much difference between two roads. There was really not much difference between the two roads, both roads lay in leaves. Both roads were about same condition. But the poet was confused that one day his selected road would be decayed like another road.

One critic considers this poem to be the work of spiritual matter. Some critics think that though the poet is naturalist, he cannot take whimsical decision. According to them, the poet lost the scope of long enjoyment. The poet thinks that his decision is correct. Fate has encouraged him to do the work. According to him, this road is the symbol of heaven and spiritual wefare. The poem is philosophical. Perhaps the poet has differeciated between the material world (That is full of pain) and the spiritual world (That is full of pleasure). The poet is prepared to choose the spiritual one.

Major Themes of Emily Dickinson's Poetry

  

Introduction

In the modern poetic world of America Emily Dickinson plays a significant and multifarious role which makes her different from contemporary modern poets. She wrote poetry of great power questioning the nature of death and immortality. Emily Dickinson is remembered for her unique poetry. Dickinson wrote from life experience and her deepest thoughts and for herself as a way of letting out her feelings. Emily Dickinson as a poet deals with various themes such as nature, love, pain and sufferings, death and immortality, God and religion, artistic philosophy, universality and so on. Thus the range of themes in her poetry is very wide. Actually she goes through the depth of humane psyche to the profundity of nature. 

Theme of Nature

Emily Dickinson feels the necessity and profundity of nature. It plays an important role to make her poetic theme glorious and age-worthy. To her nature is extremely harmonious. It is an image of human. She considers nature as the gentlest mother as she finds mother like love amidst nature. Nature is the source of joy and beauty, the beauty of that nature holds up is in the beholders' perspective.

Actually we cannot refuse Emily Dickinson's actual fascination to nature specially in her poem " A Bird come down the walk" and "A narrow Fellow in the Grass"

Theme of Love 

Emily Dickinson’s treatment of love shows her as a representative figure in the field of love and emotion. Her love poems are psychological as well as autobiographical. Love is a mystic life force it should be free from voluptuousness. Her poems run the range from renunciation to professions of love to sexual passion; they are generally intense. 

"If you were coming in the fall" 

"I cannot live with you" 

"I early took my dog" 

 "Wild nights! Wild nights!" 

Theme of Death 

Death is one of the foremost themes in Dickinson’s poetry. No two poems have exactly the same understanding of death, however. Death is sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing, sometimes simply inevitable. In “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died –,” Dickinson investigates the physical process of dying. In “Because I could not stop for Death –,“ she personifies death, and presents the process of dying as simply the realization that there is eternal life. Death is personified in many guises in her poems, ranging from a suitor to a tyrant. Her attitude is ambivalent; death is a terror to be feared and avoided, a trick played on humanity by God, a welcome relief, and a blessed way to heaven. Immortality is often related to death. 

"I heard a fly buzz when I died"

"Because I could not stop for Death"

 "Safe in their alabaster chambers" 

"I died for beauty, but was scarce" 

Theme of Immortality 

 Immortality have covered an important place in her poetic world. Emily Dickinson says death functions as a connecting link between life and immortality. The conventional idea of immortality, with its insistence upon splendor and a majestic transformation, is in her poem uniquely reworked to present her belief in the reality of the soul after death.   

 Theme of Pain and Sufferings

The theme of pain and sufferings is also an organic part of her poetic theme. Actually, Emily Dickinson is a poet of universal grief whose poetic feelings goes on with the stream of eternal sufferings. Pain plays a necessary role in human life. The amount of pain we experience generally exceeds the joy or other positive value contrasted with pain. Pain earns us purer moments of ecstasy and makes joy more vital. The pain of loss or of lacking/not having enhances our appreciation of victory, success, etc.; the pain of separation indicates the degree of our desire for union, whether with another human being or God. Food imagery is associated with this theme; hunger and thirst are the prerequisites for comprehending the value of food and drink.

"Pain has an element of blank"

"Success is counted sweetest" 

"After great pain a formal feeling comes" 

"I measure every grief I meet" 

"I had been hungry all the years" 

"My life closed twice before its close" 

Theme of God and Religion 

Man's relationship to God and nature is concerned throughout Dickinson's life.

Her attitude toward God in her poems ranges from friendliness to anger and bitterness, and He is at times indifferent, at other times cruel. 

"He fumbles at your spirit" 

"Heaven is what I cannot reach!" 

"The heart asks pleasure first" 

Conclusion 

So the final assessment goes in favor of Emily Dickinson that she transcends her poetic range to make her immortal and universal. Her universe is the universe of all people. Her poetry shows her personal confession through better experience. Then we can call her greatest as a modern poet. Emily Dickinson is totally a perfect poet who express her deepest thoughts under the guise of various themes.

Highlighting of the crisis concentrated on the poem "The Waste Land" by TS Eliott

The Waste Land is a 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1992. It has been called one of the most important long poems of the 20th century. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month" (its first line); "I will show you fear in a handful of dust"; and the Sanskrit “Shantih shantih shantih” 

The five parts of The Waste Land are entitled:

1. The Burial of the Dead, 2. A Game of Chess, 3. The Fire Sermon, 4. Death by Water, 5. What the Thunder Said.

The first four sections of the poem correspond to the Greek classical elements of Earth (burial), Air (voices – the draft title for this section was "In the Cage", an image of hanging in air; also, the element of Air is generally thought to be aligned with the intellect and the mind), Fire (passion), and Water (the draft of the poem had additional water imagery in a fishing voyage.) The title of the fifth section could be a reference to the fifth element of Aether, which is included in many mystical traditions.

The title refers to a myth from Ritual to Romance, in which Weston describes a kingdom where the genitals of the king, known as the Fisher King, have been wounded in some way. This injury, which affects the king’s fertility, also mythically affects the kingdom itself. With its vital, regenerative power gone, the kingdom has dried up and turned into a waste land. 

In order for the land to be restored, a hero must complete several tasks, or trials. Weston notes that this ancient myth was the basis for various other quest stories from many cultures, including the Christian quest for the Holy Grail. Eliot says he drew heavily on this myth for his poem, and critics have noted that many of the poem’s references refer to this idea.

The main theme is "modern life as a waste land." Eliot supports the theme by showing what was wrong with society in the early twentieth century. These shortcomings include lack of faith, lack of communication, fear of both life and death, corruption of the life-water symbol, and corruption of sex. There are two kinds of people in the modern waste land, according to Eliot. These are seen in the crowd that flows over London Bridge (62-65).

He states, "I had not thought death had undone so many." This is a reference to Dante's description of the people in Limbo. They were the dead who were neither bad nor good, just secularized. This is one category of people in the waste land (Williamson 133). The other is given by another reference to Dante: "Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled." This is descriptive of people in the first level of hell, those who were born before Christ.

There are several references in the poem to "hooded hordes walking in a ring." Madame Sosostris sees them, and the protagonist meets them as he journeys to the Perilous Chapel. The hooded hordes are hooded because they cannot see the hooded figure, the "third that always walks beside you," who represents Christ (Brooks 26). They are walking in a ring, with no sense of purpose or direction, because they have no faith (Williamson 149).

The people in the waste land also have problems with communication. This is first illustrated in the Hyacinth girl scene (35-41). She indicates that she is unable to speak, and therefore cannot communicate with the protagonist (Unger, Moments 120). Similarly, the lady of situations says "Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak." She feels the need to communicate but does not know how (Traversi 35).

The response to the command "Dayadhvam" (sympathize) also shows that the people cannot communicate. They are all sitting in their prisons, thinking of the keys that will release them, yet never getting out., the encounter between the typist and the young man reinforces the problem of selfishness. Neither the typist nor her visitor is interested in the other. They just want to please themselves.

Eliot is very discouraged about the society he has described as a waste land, but he does offer hope and a means of recovery. In Part V "What the Thunder Said," the three interpretations of DA - Datta (give), Dayadhvam (sympathize) and Damayata (control) - are the keys to new life for the waste land. They are the antithesis of modern problems. If people learn to give, sex will gain new meaning as an expression of emotion and it will no longer be corrupted. If they sympathize with each other, they will be able to communicate their true feelings and listen to those of others. Finally, if they develop self-control, their faith will return and they will no longer fear life or death.