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Robert FrostA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
For a reader of the new millennium, there is something wonderfully quaint or curiously nostalgic about Frost’s short poem. In a techno-charged modern era with less in-person communication, a poem that celebrates a speaker who relishes the opportunity to have an actual face-to-face conversation adds to the poem’s sense of time and place.
Imagine in the poem if the speaker, setting down his hoe and scanning the horizon and seeing the approaching figure, had just whipped out his smartphone and sent a quick text coded in cryptic abbreviations and emojis and then just gone back to his hoe. What is gained? What is lost? What is the definition of loneliness in this new millennium when we are more connected and more alone than ever before? Those are questions raised by a poem still relevant today.
The poem celebrates the power of communication to alleviate, even for a moment, the oppressive drudgery and loneliness of everyday life. Even the horse understands the immensity offered by this accidental encounter. The horse slows to “meaning walk” (2). Of course, the word should be “meaningful”—but the adjective “meaning” freights this moment with a kind of purpose that even a dumb animal feels.
By Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost
After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost
Birches
Robert Frost
Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
October
Robert Frost
Once by the Pacific
Robert Frost
Out, Out—
Robert Frost
Putting in the Seed
Robert Frost
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
The Death of the Hired Man
Robert Frost
The Gift Outright
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
West-Running Brook
Robert Frost