Robert Frost is one of the greatest poets in the history of the United States and four times winner of the Pulitzer Prize, who composed a famous poem, Desert Places. The text is incredibly mesmerizing – it is curious to read and explore more and more meaning in each line. Frost was one of the authors who could exceptionally maximize the usage of metaphors to convey a meaningful idea. Hence, this paper aims to analyze the chosen poem, define its vital literary devices, and identify the main themes.
Primarily, Desert Places can be perceived as one’s loneliness or humanity’s isolation. Every reader can make up their own sense depending on their current state. However, the general idea refers to solitude. In the poem, the narrator walks alone at night, feeling weirdness or lonely comfort while watching the field being covered with blankness (Kendal 351). This picture refers to nature’s disregard for humanity or to the sense of one’s inner emptiness. The speaker thinks such places are as horrifying to contemplate as the boundless emptiness of outer space (Kendal 351). Hence, the significant themes are human loneliness and nature’s indifference to an individual’s presence.
The peculiarity of Frost’s poetic manner is that episodes of everyday human activity invariably receive a multi-layered philosophical and metaphysical interpretation from him. In the first lines, Frost describes a winter night with falling darkness upon the near fields. The line “Snow falling and night falling” depicts that both night and snow are associated with something cold and inevitable (Lathem 296). In addition, the night can be a symbol of death, meaning the speaker realizes that life will end one day.
Considering the surroundings covered in snow and no life around, the character contemplates the world and its meaning. At the same time, solitude may signify facing oneself and knowing one’s real nature (Bieganowski 20). Yet sometimes it comes “with no expression, nothing to express”, which means that this state is given to become silent for a moment and listen to one’s heart (Lathem 296). Nonetheless, in this very place, one can express themselves fully by coming up with novelties. Hence, loneliness is a state of becoming creative and realizing one’s potential.
What is more, Frost elaborates the poem by using alliteration. He uses such words as “stubble showing,” “snow,” and others starting with the same letter to create a sense of something upcoming – as if the loneliness were crawling in. In the second stanza, the author narrates how feelings of absence and suffocation also affect the speaker (Bieganowski 21). He returns to the third line to declare that he is “absent-spirited”, just like the surrounding world (Lathem 296). In the meantime, the third and fourth stanzas tell about how the speaker is not afraid of the world’s emptiness: “they cannot scare me with their empty spaces” (Lathem 296). Yet, these places happen to affect him by giving him the ever-lasting sense of solitude where he has to face himself.
In conclusion, Robert Frost’s Desert Places is a symbolic poem regarding the existential question of the loneliness of a human as well as that of the entire humankind. By emphasizing that loneliness is as inevitable as falling night, the author wanted to convey the idea of listening to the silence for a moment and contemplating life. Such lonely times are also given to find one’s genuine desires and express them in a creative way.
Works Cited
Bieganowski, Roland. “Robert Frost “Desert Places”.” Explicator, vol. 38, no. 1, 1979, pp. 20-21.
Kendal, T. The Art of Robert Frost. Yale University Press. 1969.
Lathem, Edward, editor. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Hole, Rinehart, and Winston, 1969.