Symbols in Robert Frost’s poems or Symbolism in Robert Frost

Undoubtedly, Symbolism takes a greater part in a literary work. It implies an indirect suggestion of ideas. A poet may not convey his through direct statement or he can do it indirectly. Thus symbolism means a veiled mode of communication. A poem may have a surface meaning but it may also have a deeper meaning which is understood by the reader only by interpreting the deeper significance of the words and phrases used. It is obvious that a symbolic poem should be richer and more profound by the virtue of its use of symbols. However, Robert Frost’s poems are found to be largely symbolic if they are perused closely and carefully.

“After Apple Picking” is an excellent symbolic poem of Robert Frost. It is seen here in the poem that the speaker is picking apples in autumn from his orchard and he is fatigued from picking up a good number of apples. The act of harvesting apples symbolizes task in our life generally. Afterwards, the speaker of the poem says that:

“Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.”

The speaker senses that the winter is approaching after the autumn is over. Here ‘winter’ is the symbol of death and decay whereas ‘sleep’ is symbolic of death too. However, the entire poem exists on the two levels: the literal harvest finishes and the literal sleep to come, the harvest of life, now nearly finished with the sleep of death to come. The speaker has worked hard in the harvest and now he is tired and quite ready for death. He knows that his life is nearly over. So he is drowsing off.

The first poem in North of Boston, “Mending Wall” has remained one of the most typical dramatic monologues with its setting in New England. In the poem, the speaker disagrees with his neighbor at his excessive willingness to repair a wall towards the end of every winter although the natural forces want it down. Despite it, the neighbor holds firm to his father’s saying:

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

So, the speaker tells him that he should always ask himself what he is willing in or out before building a wall and who may be offended by it. Soon after that the speaker says:



“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
That wants it down.”

The speaker emphasizes that unless it serves any practical purpose there is no need for a wall. Here the wall has a symbolic implication. It stands for something other than itself: the barrier between human contact and understanding. In other words, it indicates that one should have the desire not to be alone, walled in, but to be one with the rest of the world.

Robert Frost

“Fire and Ice” is another symbolic poem by Robert Frost. The speaker of the poem is dwelling on the two theories for the end of the world. Some contend that the world will perish in fire, some ice. But the speaker favors fire and upon second thought; he adds that ice is powerful enough to destroy the world. Here the fire symbolizes desire or passion while ice is symbolic of cold hatred. They both are capable of destroying the world. The underlying symbolic meaning is that the intensity of man’s passions, which makes him human, creates the inhuman forces of disaster. The speaker says:

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.”

Frost has been deservedly praised for his good sense to speak naturally and paint the thing as he sees it by Ezra Pound. To Cleanth Brooks, Frost’s themes are in some cases stated too explicitly to come within the symbolic mood. But, on the other hand, there are several poems, indeed the majority, which lend themselves to symbolic interpretation; which go beyond ‘the thing as he sees it’ to reveal facets of meaning and richness of texture. The superficial simplicity of Frost’s poem is deceptive, and the wealth of significance can be arrived at only through a symbolic interpretation.

Robert Frost as a Pessimistic poet.

Robert Frost has a balanced philosophy of life. He is neither a pessimist to see darkness all around nor an optimistic fool who fails to understand the practical and realistic sense of life and nature. The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost’s poems is modulated by his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be alone in an ultimately indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his own condition. Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this Frost’s ability “to find the ordinary a matrix for the extraordinary.” In this respect, he is often compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a simple fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery or significance.

The poem “Birches” is an example: it contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground temporarily by a boy’s swinging on them or permanently by an ice-storm. But as the poem unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child’s play and natural phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge. Though sometimes he is frightened by nature yet he enjoys it his fill.

About social life also he remains a practical thinker who bases every experience on some or the other cause. This philosophy is at the same time modern and scientific and at the same time not non-religious. Combining both intellectual history and detailed analysis of Frost’s poems, Robert Faggen shows how Frost’s reading of Darwin reflected the significance of science in American culture from Emerson and Thoreau, through James and pragmatism. He provides fresh and provocative readings of many of Frost’s shorter lyrics and longer pastoral narratives as they illustrate the impact of Darwinian thought on the concept of nature, with particular exploration of man’s relationship to other creatures, the conditions of human equality and racial conflict, the impact of gender and sexual differences, and the survival of religion.

The book shows that Frost was neither a pessimist lamenting the uncertainties of the Darwinian worldview, nor a humanist opposing its power. Faggen draws on Frost’s unpublished notebooks to reveal a complex thinker who willingly engaged with the difficult moral and epistemological implications of natural science, and showed their consonance with myths and traditions stretching back to Milton, Lucretius, and the Old Testament. Frost emerges as a thinker for whom poetry was not only artistic expression, but also a forum for the trial of ideas and their impact on humanity.

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin provides a deeper understanding not only of Frost and modern poetry, but of the meaning of Darwin in the modern world, the complex interrelations of literature and science, and the history of American thought.