HOMEBURIAL

Summary

The poem presents a few moments of charged dialogue in a strained relationship

between a rural husband and wife who have lost a child. The woman is distraught
after catching sight of the child’s grave through the window—and more so when
her husband doesn’t immediately recognize the cause of her distress. She tries to
leave the house; he importunes her to stay, for once, and share her grief with him—
to give him a chance. He doesn’t understand what it is he does that offends her or
why she should grieve outwardly so long. She resents him deeply for his
composure, what she sees as his hard-heartedness. She vents some of her anger and
frustration, and he receives it, but the distance between them remains. She opens
the door to leave, as he calls after her.

Form

This is a dramatic lyric—“dramatic” in that, like traditional drama, it presents a

continuous scene and employs primarily dialogue rather than narrative or
description. It is dramatic, too, in its subject matter—“dramatic” in the sense of
“emotional” or “tense.” Form fits content well in this poem: One can easily
imagine two actors onstage portraying this brief, charged scene. Rhythmically,
Frost approaches pure speech—and some lines, taken out of context, sound as
prosaic as anything. For example, line 62: “I do think, though, you overdo it a
little.” Generally, there are five stressed syllables per line, although (as in line 62),
they are not always easy to scan with certainty. Stanza breaks occur where quoted
speech ends or begins.

Commentary

Pay special attention to the tone, vocabulary, and phrasing of the dialogue. At the
time of “Home Burial” ’s publication, it represented a truly new poetic genre: an
extended dramatic exercise in the natural speech rhythms of a region’s people,
from the mouths of common, yet vivid, characters.
“Home Burial” is one of Frost’s most overtly sad poems. There are at least two
tragedies here: the death of a child, which antecedes the poem, and the collapse of
a marriage, which the poem foreshadows. “Home Burial” is about grief and
grieving, but most of all it seems to be about the breakdown and limits of
communication.

The husband and the wife represent two very different ways of grieving. The
wife’s grief infuses every part of her and does not wane with time. She has been
compared to a female character in Frost’s A Masque of Mercy, of whom another
character says, “She’s had some loss she can’t accept from God.” The wife
remarks that most people make only pretense of following a loved one to the grave,
when in truth their minds are “making the best of their way back to life / And
living people, and things they understand.” She, however, will not accept this kind
of grief, will not turn from the grave back to the world of living, for to do so is to
accept the death. Instead she declares that “the world’s evil.”

The husband, on the other hand, has accepted the death. Time has passed, and he
might be more likely now to say, “That’s the way of the world,” than, “The
world’s evil.” He did grieve, but the outward indications of his grief were quite
different from those of his wife. He threw himself into the horrible task of digging
his child’s grave—into physical work. This action further associates the father with
a “way-of-the-world” mentality, with the cycles that make up the farmer’s life, and
with an organic view of life and death. The father did not leave the task of burial to
someone else, instead, he physically dug into the earth and planted his child’s body
in the soil.

One might say that any form of grief in which the bereaved stubbornly finds the
world “evil” is not a very healthy one. One could also claim that the bereaved who
never talks through his grief—who never speaks of it—is doing himself and others
injury. But, again, the purpose of the poem isn’t really to determine the right way
to grieve. Rather, it intends to portray a failure of empathy and communication.
Each person fails to appreciate the other’s grieving process—fails to credit it, allow
it, and have patience with it. And each fails to alter even slightly his or her own
form of grief in order to accommodate the other.
Note how utterly the woman misunderstands the man’s actions. To her, the act of
burying the child was one of supreme indifference, while to him it must have been
one of supreme suffering—an attempt to convince himself, through physical labor,
that this is the natural order of things; or an act of self-punishment, a penance
befitting the horror of the loss; or simply a way of steeping himself in his grief, of
forcing it into the muscles of his arms and back, of feeling it in the dirt on his
clothes. Note, too, how the wife completely fails to grasp the meaning of her
husband’s words: “ ‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best
birch fence a man can build.’ ” Indisposed to see her husbands form of grieving as
acceptable, she takes his words as literal, inappropriate comments on fence
building. Yet they have everything to do with the little body in the darkened parlor.
He is talking about death, about the futility of human effort, about fortune and
misfortune, about the unfairness of fate and nature.

And yet, the man is also partially to blame. If he had any understanding of how to
communicate to her, he would not leave everything unspoken. He would make
some concession to her needs and articulate a brief defense. “You misunderstand,”
he might say. “When I said that, it was because that was the only way I could say
anything at all about our loss.” Instead, he lets her accusations float in the air, as if
they were just hysteria and nonsense and not worth challenging. This displays a
lack of empathy and a failure of communication as fatal as hers. When she
describes his heartless act of grave digging, he says only, “I shall laugh the worst
laugh I ever laughed. / I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.” This leaves
her free to believe that he accepts her accusation, that the curse refers to his hard-
heartedness and not the terrible irony of her misinterpretation. He uses irony where
she requires clarity. She needs him to admit to agony, and he can grant her no more
than veiled references to a substratum of unspoken grief. And in the face of her
griefs obvious persistence, he makes a callous—or, at very least, extremely
counterproductive—remark: “I do think, though, you overdo it a little.”

How important a role does gender play in this tragedy? Certainly it has some
relevance. There are the husband’s futile, abortive physical threats, as if he could
physically coerce her into sharing her grief—but these are impulses of desperation.
And both husband and wife acknowledge that there are separate spheres of being
and understanding. “Cant a man speak of his own child he’s lost?” asks the
husband. “I don’t know rightly whether any man can,” she replies. A little later he
laments, “A man must partly give up being a man / With womenfolk.” He sees his
taciturnity and his inability to say the appropriate thing as a masculine trait, and
she seems to agree. (Yet she sees his quiet grave digging as nearly inhuman.)
Additionally, it is fairly standard to assume that more outward emotion is permitted
of women than of men—the tragedy of this poem might then be seen as an
exacerbation of a pervasive inequality. Yet one enduring stereotype of gender
distinctions is the man’s inability to read between the lines, his failure to
apprehend the emotions underlying the literal meaning of the woman’s words. In
this poem, husband and wife fail equally in this manner. A woman, perhaps, might
be less likely to dig a grave to vent her grief, but she is just as likely to react to
death by withdrawal or by immersion in quotidian tasks. The reader witnesses the
breakdown of a marriage (the burial of a home, expressed in the title’s double
entendre), but more basically, this is a breakdown of human communication.

Partly, that breakdown is due to the inescapable limits of any communication.

Much of the literature of the twentieth century stems from an acknowledgement of
these limits, from attempts to grapple with them and, paradoxically, express them.
A great deal of Frost’s poetry deals with an essential loneliness, which is linked to
the limits of empathy and the sense that some things are simply inexpressible.
What can one really say about the loss of one’s child? Can one adequately convey
one’s grief on such an occasion? Is empathy—always a challenge—doomed to fail
under such particular strain?

We should note in passing—though it is not of merely passing importance—that

Frost knew firsthand the experience of losing children. His firstborn son, Elliott,
died of cholera at the age of three. Later, his infant daughter died. Two more of his
children died fairly young, one by suicide.