Home Burial

"Home Burial" may not be as popular as "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man," but it is Frost's most critically acclaimed and intensively analyzed narrative. Again, Frost deals with barriers between people -- in this case a husband and wife who have recently lost their first child and who handle their grief in strikingly different ways -- according to their characters and expressive capabilities. The locale is a New England farm with a family burial plot in the yard, illustrating familiarity with death, which partly accounts for the husband's silent handling of his grief. The poem opens with intense looking and severe gestures between the man and woman, as she gazes from a stairway window at the backyard grave of her recently dead child, defensively and accusatorially, both calling attention to herself and refusing her husband's concern for her grief. He seems not to have noticed the view from the window, but his tender description of the gravestones and the child's mound -- not yet marked with a stone -- show that he is not unfeeling but that such family deaths have become an everyday part of his life. Often it seems that writers have their own personal inspiration that fuels a great work to cause its readers to realize the complexity of the human nature. Robert Frost's "Home Burial" is a masterfully written example of such works, conceived from his and his wife's anguish at the loss of their first-born son as well as from the estrangement between his sister-in-law and her husband due to the death of their child.

Conflicting Minds the theme of "Home Burial," by Robert Frost, is the misunderstanding between a husband and a wife because of conflicting attitudes regarding the death of a child and that these opposing attitudes can cause the death of a relationship as well. The wife feels that her husband does not care about the death of their baby. However, this is not true. The husband takes a closed approach when mourning over his child's death, while his wife grieves openly. Through setting and symbols, Frost shows how the husband and wife are characterized