25 pages • 50-minute read
Home Burial
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Literary Devices
Form and Meter
In his first book, A Boy’s Will, Frost often used elevated 19th-century language to express his thoughts. In one of the last poems in the collection, “A Tuft of Flowers,” Frost used more colloquial language that was commonplace amongst those in New England. When he wrote North of Boston, he primarily used this type of speech, while still employing iambic pentameter and blank verse. Frost’s blending of the old (iambic blank verse) with the new (everyday speech and location) was innovative for the time, creating poems that sounded epic yet familiar. The couple’s fraught dialogue regarding their son’s death has both an intimacy due to its domestic subject and a timelessness due to the even meter, despite the occasional deviations that critics point out. Katherine Kearns, for instance, has noted, “of the husband's forty-nine lines, fifteen are extrasyllabic; of the wife’s forty-one lines, seventeen are extrasyllabic” and how these differences are “used by Frost within the dialogue to reveal the uncontrol and frustration of both husband and wife” (Kearns, Katherine. “On ‘Home Burial.’” Modern American Poetry).
Stage and Sympathy
To make readers sympathetic to both characters in “Home Burial,” Frost chose to write their altercation in near stage play form. An objective narrator describes where the characters are positioned, setting the stage as it were, which creates the sense that an audience is watching actors move about. One can visualize how Amy “[sinks] upon her skirts” (Line 8) or “turn[s] on him with such a daunting look” (Line 35). The husband sits down, “fix[ing] his chin between his fists” (Line 43). This technique forces one to consider each subsequent action and bit of dialogue and how it might be charged with each of their separate desires. Giving little interior thought keeps one riveted to every sentence as it unfolds to discover where the couple’s estrangement lies. The audience is also kept in the dark, and as each bit of information is revealed, interest sways, forcing resistance to naming a clearcut villain or hero. This shows how both Amy and her husband are grieving, adding to the complexity of their human emotions as their altercation reaches a climax with Amy’s potential exit.
Enjambment
When a line of poetry runs into the next, it’s called enjambment. This creates the effect of the first line having one meaning at its break, then the meaning changes as the thought is finished in the next. This allows a poet to create multiple meanings or emotional effects in a condensed form. Frost does this in “Home Burial” to increase the complexity of action and dialogue.
In the beginning of the poem, Amy takes “a doubtful step and then undid it / To raise herself and look again” (Lines 4-5). Breaking on “undid it” (Line 4) shows that Amy is second-guessing herself. Yet, her lift on her toes in the next line shows a questing action to see beyond the limitation. Later, the husband says, “Let me into your grief. I’m not so much / Unlike other folks” (Lines 62-63). The break emphasizes the husband’s chiding his wife about how she treats him, implying he is not as difficult and obtuse as she thinks, while the comparison to “other folks” (Line 63) works as persuasion for her to not see him as alien.
This double meaning adds to multiple themes. A last example exists within Amy’s unfinished sentences: “I must go— / Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you—” (Lines 116-117). The first break in this sequence, “I must go” (Line 116) could be followed by away from you or to someone else, but she shows that it is the house, or the scene of the crime, that bothers her. The break after “you” (Line 117) could be followed by the word understand, or see, or pay for what you’ve done, but Amy stops herself from finishing. Given Amy’s grief, this break allows multiple alternatives to pass through the reader’s mind. Enjambment is used deliberately to enhance characters and complexity and heightens the tension apparent in “Home Burial.”
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