Question

Why do we sense a hint of reluctance in the tone of the poet in the very beginning of the poem ?​

Answer 1

Answer:

Critically appreciate Robert Frost's poem "Reluctance" would be very helpful if the answer is detailed

Explanation:

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Critically appreciate Robert Frost's poem "Reluctance" would be very helpful if the answer is detailed

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JAMES KELLEY eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR

There are all sorts of ways to critically appreciate this poem.

You can start by looking at where the poem first appears and what form of poem it is. With just a little digging, I found that "Reluctance" is a lyric poem from Robert Frost's earliest collection, A Boy's Will (1913). There's more to say about what makes this poem a lyric poem, of course, and that explanation would focus on the speaker in the poem and on the poem's subject.

You can continue to look at the form of the poem, reflecting on how it's built. It has 24 lines, broken into 4 stanzas of 6 lines each. You can look at meter, maybe noting that the final line is shorter than all of the other lines in each stanza. The first five lines have three beats each (trimeter) whereas the final line has only two (dimeter). Here's the meter of the final two lines of the first stanza, using capital letters instead of the usual tick mark, to show the stressed syllables or beats:

I have COME by the HIGHway HOME,

And LO, it is ENded.

You can also look at the rhyme. Noting the structural elements in a poem can sometimes lead to interesting discoveries about how that poem works. In this case, though, all it has me doing is questioning the effectiveness of the rhymes in stanza three ("wither" and "whither" are pronounced the same, which doesn't seem like Frost as his best).

Of course, the content is at least as important as the form. Read the poem a couple of times, look for patterns, develops ideas of your own about what the poem means, and test those ideas in a rereading of the poem. To me, the first stanza reads more like an allegory than a nature poem; the speaker gives few details about the world he moves through. This stanza, to me, says pretty much (using metaphors) that the speaker has lived away from home for a good while, experienced much, and then returned home. The adventure of life (or maybe something else) is over.

The winter imagery through the rest of the poem reinforces this sense of an ending, even as it may hint that another beginning is just around the corner. The poem ends with a question about how well humans tend to or should accept "the end / Of a love or a season." They shouldn't accept it gracefully and meekly, the speaker seems to think.