Home Burial by Robert Frost | Analysis
12.3 هزار بار بازدید -
6 سال پیش
-
You can read this poem
You can read this poem in full here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
As you can tell by the ridiculous length of this video, when I made this it seems I completely forgot the concise format I used for Death of the Hired Man, and instead went through this super long poem in lots of detail. I realise a forty minute video on a single poem is pretty intimidating, so here's a little breakdown:
-The usual format of what happens, a line-by-line analysis and a look at the poem's form takes you up to 25 minutes. From then I start looking at the themes. This is perhaps the less essential part of the video, as quite a lot of it is reinforcing what has already been said.
-However, I would recommend watching "Communication" (starts at 24:40) because in my opinion it's the most important element of the poem (it being the lens through which we explore the other subject matter) and this part of the video does have a few new points e.g. who is BETTER at communicating, the husband or the wife?
-30:45 Home - this doesn't cover much that hasn't been said already, but I included it because it frames everything related to this theme in one discussion, which might be helpful.
-32:34 Grief - again, this is basically just gathering all the information about grief into one place, so isn't essential to watch it as long as you paid attention to the line-by-line analysis.
-34:14 Gender - this part I would recommend watching because I barely touch on this theme earlier in the video, and the examination of gender in this poem is soooooo fascinating.
While we're on the subject of the line-by-line analysis... sorry for the totally over-dramatic reading in this video! I had just joined a theatre group when I made this and I couldn't resist exercising my acting muscles. :D My director later told me I use loud exhalations too much to express emotion, and that paired with the terrible microphone quality makes the audio in this video pretty appalling, I know. Since making this I have worked on expressing emotion through the WORDS when reading dialogue, and have stopped holding the microphone so close to my mouth when recording the narration for these videos. Ah, the weird specific stuff you learn when making powerpoints about poetry.
Onto a happier subject, this channel now has 50 subscribers!!!! Whoa. I really did not expect people to subscribe to a channel like this - I thought powerpoint videos like this would only be something people would watch sporadically, depending on the poem they're reading at the time. But the way so many of you seem to be engaged in examining Robert Frost himself and his poetry as a whole is really inspiring and cool to see. If you have subscribed, thank you so much, I really appreciate it!
My sources for this analysis were:
https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/fro...
https://www.shmoop.com/home-burial/
Video (woop woop another YouTube video!)
One more thing I wanted to mention was a conversation I had recently with a woman I know who is a big fan of Robert Frost. I mentioned to her that I'd been studying this poem and she said something which has really stuck with me - that it had helped her understand the situation when her mother-in-law was dying. Through reading the poem, she realised that anything she said about it would only create more division between them, because it would only demonstrate how she couldn't possibly imagine what her mother-in-law was going through. I imagine she was paralleling herself with the husband in this poem, who tries to understand his wife's grief but the more he says, the more he just shows how he doesn't get what she's experiencing. To me this highlights how the characters in Home Burial spend too much time speaking and not enough listening, do too much presuming and not enough understanding - and in this way them trying so hard to communicate and be heard by one another actually gets in the way of true connection between them. Maybe Frost was trying to tell us that some things are too harrowing or difficult to express in words, and they need time and empathy to solve them instead.
It's amazing to think of how the same stories can be interpreted differently by different people, and can relate to each of our lives in such different but often really deep ways. I really appreciated hearing that woman's story of how this poem spoke to her, so I thought it was worth sharing.
Peace and love y'all x
As you can tell by the ridiculous length of this video, when I made this it seems I completely forgot the concise format I used for Death of the Hired Man, and instead went through this super long poem in lots of detail. I realise a forty minute video on a single poem is pretty intimidating, so here's a little breakdown:
-The usual format of what happens, a line-by-line analysis and a look at the poem's form takes you up to 25 minutes. From then I start looking at the themes. This is perhaps the less essential part of the video, as quite a lot of it is reinforcing what has already been said.
-However, I would recommend watching "Communication" (starts at 24:40) because in my opinion it's the most important element of the poem (it being the lens through which we explore the other subject matter) and this part of the video does have a few new points e.g. who is BETTER at communicating, the husband or the wife?
-30:45 Home - this doesn't cover much that hasn't been said already, but I included it because it frames everything related to this theme in one discussion, which might be helpful.
-32:34 Grief - again, this is basically just gathering all the information about grief into one place, so isn't essential to watch it as long as you paid attention to the line-by-line analysis.
-34:14 Gender - this part I would recommend watching because I barely touch on this theme earlier in the video, and the examination of gender in this poem is soooooo fascinating.
While we're on the subject of the line-by-line analysis... sorry for the totally over-dramatic reading in this video! I had just joined a theatre group when I made this and I couldn't resist exercising my acting muscles. :D My director later told me I use loud exhalations too much to express emotion, and that paired with the terrible microphone quality makes the audio in this video pretty appalling, I know. Since making this I have worked on expressing emotion through the WORDS when reading dialogue, and have stopped holding the microphone so close to my mouth when recording the narration for these videos. Ah, the weird specific stuff you learn when making powerpoints about poetry.
Onto a happier subject, this channel now has 50 subscribers!!!! Whoa. I really did not expect people to subscribe to a channel like this - I thought powerpoint videos like this would only be something people would watch sporadically, depending on the poem they're reading at the time. But the way so many of you seem to be engaged in examining Robert Frost himself and his poetry as a whole is really inspiring and cool to see. If you have subscribed, thank you so much, I really appreciate it!
My sources for this analysis were:
https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/fro...
https://www.shmoop.com/home-burial/
Video (woop woop another YouTube video!)
One more thing I wanted to mention was a conversation I had recently with a woman I know who is a big fan of Robert Frost. I mentioned to her that I'd been studying this poem and she said something which has really stuck with me - that it had helped her understand the situation when her mother-in-law was dying. Through reading the poem, she realised that anything she said about it would only create more division between them, because it would only demonstrate how she couldn't possibly imagine what her mother-in-law was going through. I imagine she was paralleling herself with the husband in this poem, who tries to understand his wife's grief but the more he says, the more he just shows how he doesn't get what she's experiencing. To me this highlights how the characters in Home Burial spend too much time speaking and not enough listening, do too much presuming and not enough understanding - and in this way them trying so hard to communicate and be heard by one another actually gets in the way of true connection between them. Maybe Frost was trying to tell us that some things are too harrowing or difficult to express in words, and they need time and empathy to solve them instead.
It's amazing to think of how the same stories can be interpreted differently by different people, and can relate to each of our lives in such different but often really deep ways. I really appreciated hearing that woman's story of how this poem spoke to her, so I thought it was worth sharing.
Peace and love y'all x
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