Essay Database

"Home Burial" may not be as popular as "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man," but it is Frost's mos critically acclaimed and intesively annalyzed 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 -- acording to their characters and expressive capabilities. The locale is a New England farm with …

…characters do not seem much like the poet and his wife, Frost may have put into them some of her tendency toward exaggeration and his own almost willful and defensive pretense that he does not understand things that thinks are improper. A balanced view might be that the poem shows compassion for two different human types in view of not only their loss but also their covert insistence on and exaggeration of their differences. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------