On two dark, cynical, and crucially human portrayals of home in one of our
most home-ly poets.
It’s not really accurate to say that Robert
Frost spent his life in rural New England: he was born in San Francisco and
spent his first eleven years there; when his family then moved east they lived
in the city of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost graduated from high school;
and he spent significant later time in London, in Ann Arbor, and in Florida,
among other places. But nonetheless, the popular and dominant association of
Frost with that one region, and even more exactly with his home on a New
Hampshire farm, remains, and with good reason: not only because it was his
most consistent and stable locale, but also and even more significantly because
so many of his best and most enduring poems utilize details and elements of
that setting and world. Yet if those popular narratives, based perhaps on “Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening,” categorize Frost’s rural world as a calm and peaceful one,
they miss much of the complex darkness he also portrayed within that setting.
Interestingly, and importantly, two of the darkest such images are created
in poems that are centrally concerned with the idea of home. “Home Burial” (1915),
included in Frost’s early collection North of Boston, comprises a strained
and difficult dialogue between two parents who have recently lost their young
son (and whom the father, to the mother’s anger, buried himself on their
property). “The
Death of the Hired Man” (1915), from the same collection, focuses on a
conversation between an elderly farm couple about the titular employee, who has
spent many years working for them and has come back to their farm at the end of
his life; discussing why he has done so, the couple offer one of the most
famous passages about home in American poetry: “‘Home is the place where, when
you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ / ‘I should have called it /
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’” While those two ideas differ in
tone, they’re both more dark and cynical than stereotypes such as “Home is
where the heart is.” And similarly, while the first poem’s association of death
and home is a tragic and painful one, and the second’s more accepting and
natural, the two are nonetheless united, from their titles on, by that sense of
home as a place of inevitable and even defining loss.
So should we just conclude that Frost was a good deal more cynical and
curmudgeonly than popular favorite “Stopping by Woods” would indicate? I don’t
think that’d be a false conclusion—this is the poet who wrote “Good fences
make good neighbors,” and while that’s the voice of a character within the
poem you get the feeling that Frost didn’t disagree—but I also would argue that
something else, something more universal, is going on in “Burial” and “Hired
Man.” After all, it’s entirely true that home is where the heart is—but of
course the heart contains, particularly as we get older, as much loss as it
does love, as much sorrow as it does joy, as much death as it does life. And so
too are homes not only full of those with whom we share them, amazing as those
presences hopefully are; they’re also full of those with whom we don’t, for all
the complicated and sad and tough and human reasons that lead to those absences.
That Frost was able to recognize and put into poetic words those darker sides to
home only cements his status as one of our most home-ly national voices.
Next home connections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Responses to these ideas? Other images and ideas of
home in America you’d highlight?
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