Poem 224- Desert Places

A.) This poem, by Robert Frost, describes the lonliness that is an unavoidable part of human nature and discusses the fact that lonliness is something that comes from within. The poem is a quatrain of 4 stanzas with a three-line rhyme scheme that goes AABA. The speaker is unidentified but is clearly someone who suffers from depression and feels that they are trapped with no facet for their emotions as demonstrated in the line, "With no expression, nothing to express"(Frost 12). I am going to refer to the speaker as "he" just for simplicity. The poem has a numbness that is greatly attributed to by the references to the cold and isolated aspects of nature. The poem is established in a very orderly fashion and the rhyme scheme helps it to flow smoothly. I think this contributes to the overall fact that life will go on despite the speaker's feeling of inescapable sadness. The pattern of the third line not rhyming with the rest symbolizes how pitfalls in life are a part of the human experience and we are going to hit some bumps along the way but life will continue nonetheless.

B.) Frost uses several literary devices including paradox, personification, imagery, and irony. The speaker is paralleling his emotional state of lonliness and desolation with the snow, nightfall, and infinite emptiness of space to convey the point that his lonliness is natural to him. The paradox is the fact that these vast things do not hold as much lonliness as the speaker holds within himself in his mind. The lines, "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces"(13) and "I have it in me so much nearer home/ To scare myself with my own desert places" (15-16) symbolize how the speaker feels about his lonliness. This paradox conveys the message that sometimes things seem so much bigger than they really are when we are personally experiencing them. The speaker believes he contains more lonliness and desolation, as symbolized by his "own desert places", than the entire universe. To help the reader better identify with the speaker's feelings toward his inner lonliness, Frost personifies the snow and the nightfall in the lines, "A blanker whiteness of benighted snow/ With no expression, nothing to express./ They cannot scare me with their empty spaces" (11-13). This also represents how the speaker cannot express his sadness just as the snow cannot; he is blank as well. The imagery of the poem adds to the meaning and experience of the poem also due to its ability to conjure an image within the reader's mind. The snow connotates cold, blankness, and winter, a time of death, while the nightfall conjures images of infinite darkness and lack of color and life to add to portray the speaker's utter emptiness and state of depression. Imagery also comes up in the lines, "And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,/ But a few weeds and stubble showing last"(3-4) represent how the speaker's situation is only going to get worse as the snow completely covers everything but also serves as a reminder that there is still life under the snow that will show again adding to the message that life goes on. Irony with the connotation that the stars in the line, "Between stars-on stars where no human race is"(14) brings adds to the message that things are not always as they seem, as with the speaker's feeling that his lonliness is bigger than the universe. Stars generally bring about images of inspiration, magesty, and happiness but here they are just another vast expanse of emptiness and isolation. This shows just how desperate the speaker feels toward his emotional situation.

C.) I really enjoyed the complexity of this poem that was hidden beneath the surface. Although it was definitely not an uplifting type of poem, it did represent the fact that life goes on despite anything that makes us feel like we will never be happy again. Everyone has circumstances or emotions that make them feel down and like they are just never going to feel good again but, when put in perspective, nothing is that big of a deal. Once we get past those initial feelings of loss and emptiness, we are generally able to see the bigger picture. I enjoyed the imagery of the poem as well because there are certainly times when I feel that there's just nothing I can do to pick myself out of a slump as was symbolized by the vast emptiness of the snow, night, and universe. I thought Frost did a superb job of tying in a great deal of meaning with the three-line rhyme scheme, paradox, personifcation, and irony to immensely contribute to the experience of the poem.