A new-to-me Robert Frost poem

My online Yale course on modern poetry continues. Over the weekend, I listened to the two lectures on Robert Frost and learned about a poem of his I wasn't at all familiar with. It is very different from the more familiar "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall." The poem is called "Home Burial," and it's mostly dialogue between a husband and wife who have buried a child. Although really they're having a fight. It's emotional and intense. Some of it just gives me the chills.

It's a long poem, and I won't copy it all here, but you can read it online via this link.

I'll just note that the spacing of the words on the page is important to reading it, and the above link is better than most others on the Internet. But it does differ a little bit from my copy of the poem in the Norton Anthology. (Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 Fifth Edition in my case -- old! -- not the new Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry that's on my Amazon wish list.) Point being if you have a Norton you might want to read "Home Burial" out of the Norton.

Alright, so our Yale teacher Langdon Hammer has this to say about "Home Burial":

The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself from trying to hold on to the dead child, and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past, which is also, frankly, a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force, to escape his will, I think. His will, his force – these are his ways, his resources for responding to death. ...

Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work, the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world, a safe world, into being. There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world but the material conditions of our circumstances. Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers, you see the poet himself, wanting to know; and wanting to know means pressing towards some revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things, a search for some kind of presence behind the way things are.

The Yale online people are so wonderful, they have posted the transcript of Hammer's lecture online so you can read it all for yourself if you like. I myself prefer to listen to the lectures on my iPod because Langdon Hammer has this wonderfully sonorous voice and his manner is the perfect combination of learned and diffident. Next up: World War I and Imagism.