write about frost attitude towards nature and bring salient features of frost as a poet of rural life
Answers
Answered by
8
The Pastoral: Its NatureThe word "Pastoral" is derived from the Greek word "pastor" which means, "to graze". Hence pastoral poetry is a kind of poetry which deals with the life of the humble dwellers in the countryside with their work, with their loves and pleasures, with their humble joys and sorrows. The background, the setting, is provided by the world of leaves and flowers, and the cyclic changes in season. Pastoral poetry flourished most vigorously in the age of Theocritus and Virgil among the ancients, and during the Renaissance in modern times. But with the passing of time pastoral poetry in England lost its naturalness and simplicity, and became artificial and conventional. Thus we find Dr. Johnson condemning Lycidas for its use of the artificial convention of the pastoral. The unhappy shepherd, the fair shepherdess, the wandering flock, the daisies and violets, the dance on the village green, the flowery wreath, and the oaten pipe, all came to be regarded as the essential part of the pastoral, and were used by one poet after another, as the conventional decor of their poems.
Frost's Poetry: The Rural ThemesHowever, as J.F. Lynen points out Frost's poetry is entirely free from such conventional and artificial elements. He has succeeded in capturing the simplicity and naturalness of the earliest Greek masters of this form. The greatness of Frost, as a pastoral poet has been universally recognised. The bulk of his poetry deals with rural life, and his pastoral poetry provides the centre, the basis, from which to study even that part of his poetry which is not strictly pastoral. One has simply to glance through Frost's Collected Poems to form an idea of the importance of rural life in the poetry of Frost.Rural Characters—Their Ways and HabitsNew England, or more strictly speaking that part of it which lies north of Boston provides the rural context, within which Frost's most characteristic poems are presented. It is this rural world which provides him not only with the setting but also with the objects, the incidents, the events, and the characters he writes about. His personages are all New Englanders and his poetry is a record of their characters and habits, as well as of the various aspects of their life and activity, their beliefs, ideals, traditions, and codes of conduct. In After Apple-picking, we get a true and interesting picture of the tired farmer going home for rest after the day's labour of picking apples:My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Towards heaven still
And there's barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there maybe two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.Thrift is a recognized trait of the inhabitants of New England. "Perhaps the rugged land fostered in the settlers of New England an attitude of making the most of what was available to them. Whatever the causes, the Yankees early developed the finest of making the best of thing…....Thrifty and hard working, they had little time for idle talk." The farmer in Blueberries, who fed his entire family on blueberries, is thrifty, one who has but to use Shakespeare's adage, "Sweet are the uses of adversity":He seems to be thrifty; and hasn't he need,
With the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed? He has brought them all up on wild berries, they say
Like birds……..
They eat them the year round, and those they don't eat
They sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet.In a similar way, the farmer in Mending Wall who would say no more than, "Good fences make good neighbours", is not being silly or adamant, but is merely trying to make secure for himself the land he has acquired, the garden he has planted, through such hard work.The Spirit of AdjustmentFrost's swinger of birches, too, has the New England spirit of adjustment in him. He lives far away from the city where alone he could have learnt to pay baseball. So he manages with what is at hand. He plays on the birches.Some boy too far from town to learn baseball
Whose only play was what he found himself.
Frost's Poetry: The Rural ThemesHowever, as J.F. Lynen points out Frost's poetry is entirely free from such conventional and artificial elements. He has succeeded in capturing the simplicity and naturalness of the earliest Greek masters of this form. The greatness of Frost, as a pastoral poet has been universally recognised. The bulk of his poetry deals with rural life, and his pastoral poetry provides the centre, the basis, from which to study even that part of his poetry which is not strictly pastoral. One has simply to glance through Frost's Collected Poems to form an idea of the importance of rural life in the poetry of Frost.Rural Characters—Their Ways and HabitsNew England, or more strictly speaking that part of it which lies north of Boston provides the rural context, within which Frost's most characteristic poems are presented. It is this rural world which provides him not only with the setting but also with the objects, the incidents, the events, and the characters he writes about. His personages are all New Englanders and his poetry is a record of their characters and habits, as well as of the various aspects of their life and activity, their beliefs, ideals, traditions, and codes of conduct. In After Apple-picking, we get a true and interesting picture of the tired farmer going home for rest after the day's labour of picking apples:My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Towards heaven still
And there's barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there maybe two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.Thrift is a recognized trait of the inhabitants of New England. "Perhaps the rugged land fostered in the settlers of New England an attitude of making the most of what was available to them. Whatever the causes, the Yankees early developed the finest of making the best of thing…....Thrifty and hard working, they had little time for idle talk." The farmer in Blueberries, who fed his entire family on blueberries, is thrifty, one who has but to use Shakespeare's adage, "Sweet are the uses of adversity":He seems to be thrifty; and hasn't he need,
With the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed? He has brought them all up on wild berries, they say
Like birds……..
They eat them the year round, and those they don't eat
They sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet.In a similar way, the farmer in Mending Wall who would say no more than, "Good fences make good neighbours", is not being silly or adamant, but is merely trying to make secure for himself the land he has acquired, the garden he has planted, through such hard work.The Spirit of AdjustmentFrost's swinger of birches, too, has the New England spirit of adjustment in him. He lives far away from the city where alone he could have learnt to pay baseball. So he manages with what is at hand. He plays on the birches.Some boy too far from town to learn baseball
Whose only play was what he found himself.
Similar questions