Home Burial by Robert Frost - Notes

Home Burial by Robert Frost - Notes

   The poem gives a vivid description of the scene prevailing in the set up accompanied by the presence of dialogues enough to call the poem a dramatic one. There are two characters in the poem who are a couple, the parents of a child who has recently died and the father has entered the house after burying the child in his family's graveyard which is just outside their house or very near such that it can be viewed through one of the windows of their house.

   A crisis is presented in the poem which is that the couple's conversation is inconsolable to each other and the wife needs more of it. When the husband asks:
“What is it you see,” —you must tell me, dear.”
though the word 'dear' must soothe her, she considers this question of his to be as if showing indifference to the death of their child because he is able to ask such a casual question seemingly void of grief after taking up such a heartbreaking, difficult and nearly impossible task of burying his own child with his own hands. She asks him rhetorically about what he could see sensing how indiscriminate he could be to their grief, for which he replies:
“Just that I see.” I never noticed it from here before.", trying to make a casual comment. He might either be pretending to be cool or trying to cover up his emotions because men usually are accustomed to suppressing their emotions within their hearts unlike women who are too tender to withhold themselves from exhibiting their emotions. And then he makes a seemingly objective and practical statement:
"But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child’s mound——” in which the word 'understand' denotes just the aspect of mind simultaneously denoting the absence of the aspect of heart which is 'feeling' at least only in the statement. The phrase 'child's mound' is unbearable to hear by the mother. It grieves her so much that she cries him to stop and gives a 'daunting look'. At this, the man also gets angry and asks a generalised question of courtesy:
“Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”
for which she replies that she does not know whether any man can actually speak of such griefs. The man again gives a kind of  epigramatic sentence saying:
"A man must partly give up being a man with women-folk."
She seems to usually go to her friends to share her feelings but this time the husband stops her from going to anyone else and asks her to give him a chance to share her feelings with him.
He says: "Let me into your grief.....Give me my chance." Immediately after this, he also adds:
"I do think, though, you overdo it a little." shattering himself the words of consolation which he just built for her wife. He also says that she would be thinking that he is satisfied with what happened with him - the loss of his child! which is not true. He also has the grief equally, just that it's different in the way of showing it.
She says:
"If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand—how could you?—......your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns."
He asks her what should he have done, whether he should have laughed helplessly for crying is not easy for men or for her making of such ridiculous statements. He asserts that he does know and believe that his 'son' has died and says that he is like cursed if he does not believe or admit the fact, simply, trying to convince her in some way that he also feels for the happening. He understands that she thinks of the necessary task of burying which he had to do, as inhuman. She extends her contempt by sarcastically asking him to talk more about petty things of every day life on such a sorrowful occasion just as he had said sometime before:
‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’
She says that friends may seem to be close to us but when we die they are not really cared about us.  Such is the world and so it's evil. She grieves because she could not change this quality of the world, meaning, she cannot pretend like such friends of the world and cannot stop mourning abruptly. After she has said all this, after going through the difficult phase of not being able to utter anything out of grief, he shows his satisfaction that she finally was able to vent out her grief. Nevertheless, she prepares to get out of the house when he keeps on insisting her not to leave the house.
   It is understood that both mourn the loss of their first child but the wife doesn't approve of the normal way her husband behaves.
   The need for writing such a poem could be traced down to Robert Frost's life itself because he himself had experienced deaths of his several children.