Home Burial

Robert Frost’s "Home Burial" is a narrative poem that speaks about life’s tragedies. The theme of "Home Burial” centers around the death of a child. The couple in this poem had a baby who died. The mother grieves openly and it seems as though she hasn’t really been able to recover from the loss of her child. When parents loose a child they are usually able to gradually, not move on, but come to terms with it and are able to continue living their life. Unfortunately the mother in this poem cannot do this. It is hard to say whether or not the husband is able to move on because he, like most men, have a hard time getting their emotions across, or even showing them at all. Many men cope with their emotions by staying busy and working and in this man’s case he got harsh and semi violent with his wife. "Home Burial" demonstrates how one tragedy can cause another to occur.

The baby is buried in the family graveyard, which is visible from an upstairs window of their house. Day after day when the wife goes up and down the stairs she looks out the window and sees the grave and basically re opens the wound everyday. He husband asks her what she is looking at and when he realizes he, once again, doesn’t really show the emotion she was looking for, causing the wife to become angry and bitter. She can’t understand why her husband doesn’t show his grief for their lost child and it makes her doubt him. He takes a stand in line 41 “Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time” and begs her not to leave and go grieve with he friends because he doesn’t think they need that burden.

The husband’s in ability to show his emotions and the wife’s inability to understand why he can’t, tears them apart, which plays back into the unfortunate line of events that is one tragedy creates another. There are three main tragedies that play into the idea of a burial. First there is the child that dies and is then buried. The couple’s marriage could not survive such an emotional loss. Therefore the marriage becomes buried. When the marriage became buried the home became its own burial spot for this family’s life.

“Home Burial” is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Many times when I read a poem and it doesn’t rhyme I find it hard to accept the fact that it is indeed a poem. I have to remember that there are different aspects of poetry that don’t only have to do with rhyming, such as certain structures and stanzas in a poem. Because of the way it was written it seemed as though Frost wanted to tell this more as a dialogue or a story instead of a poem, however he did follow the “guidelines and rules” of poetry.