1 Content Introduction

1.3 The tragedy of Frost's creations 
Frost has often been called a tragic and even terrifying poet. In the poem 
"Home Funeral" / " Home burial » poet t- narrator . _ _ Although "Home Burial" is 
not a narrative, it is an eclogue, more precisely, a pastoral, however, very gloomy. 
But since it tells a story, it is definitely a story; although the mode of presentation 
in it is dialogue, and the genre is determined precisely by the mode of presentation. 
Invented by Theocritus in his idylls, perfected by Virgil in the poems called 
eclogues or bucolics, the pastoral is essentially an exchange of lines between two 
or more characters in the bosom of nature, with the usual recourse to the unfading 
theme of love. Since the English and French word "pastoral" is loaded with 
pleasant connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus , and 
not only chronologically, let's, following Virgil, call this poem an eclogue. There is 
a rural setting here, as well as two characters: a farmer and his wife, who can pass 
for a shepherd and a shepherdess, if you forget that this happens two thousand 
years later. The theme is the same: love after two thousand years. 
In short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By this I mean Virgil "Bucolic" and " 
Georgics ", not Virgil "Aeneid". Start off being young Frost farmed and wrote a 
lot. The pose of a gentleman farmer was not quite a pose. In fact, until the end of 
his days, he continued to buy farms. At the time of his death he owned, if I am not 
mistaken, four farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew a thing or two 

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about how to feed from the land, at least as much as Virgil, who seemed to be a 
terrible farmer, judging by the agronomic advice scattered in the Georgics . 
With a few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian , in other 
words, contemplative. That is to say, if you take the four Roman poets of the 
August period: Propertius , Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, as representative of the four 
known temperaments (the choleric intensity of Propertius , the sanguine 
copulations of Ovid, the phlegmatic reflections of Virgil, the melancholic poise of 
Horace), then American poetry -- and poetry on English language in general - 
seems to be poetry mainly of the Virgilian or Horacian type. (Think of the 
cumbersome monologues of the late Wallace Stevens or the late American Auden 
.) However, Frost's resemblance to Virgil is not so much in temperament as in 
technique. In addition to the frequent recourse to a guise (or mask) and the 
possibility of detachment that a fictional character gives the poet, Frost and Virgil 
have a common tendency to hide the real subject of dialogue under the 
monotonous matte sheen of their pentameters and hexameters, respectively. A poet 
of exceptional depth and uneasiness, Virgil's "Eclogues" and " Georgics " are 
commonly mistaken for a singer of love and country joys, as is the author of 
"North of Boston." 
Added to this is that Frost 's Virgil comes to you obscured by Wadsworth 
and Browning. Perhaps it would be better to say " filtered", and Browning's 
dramatic monologue is quite a filter, reducing the dramatic situation to sheer 
Victorian ambivalence and suspense. Frost's dark pastorals are just as dramatic, not 
only in the sense of the intensity of the characters' relationships, but most of all in 
the sense that they are truly theatrical. 
This is a kind of theater in which the author plays all the roles, including 
stage designer, director, choreographer, and so on. He also extinguishes the light, 
and sometimes represents the audience. 
And this is justified. For the idylls of Theocritus , like almost all ancient 
poetry, in turn, are nothing but a squeeze from the Greek drama. In "Home Burial" 
we have an arena turned into a staircase with railings in the spirit of Hitchcock . 

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The opening line tells you as much about the positions of the actors as about their 
roles: the hunter and his game. Or, as you will see later , Pygmalion and Galatea, 
with the difference that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. 
Ultimately, "Home Burial " is a love poem, and on that basis alone, it can be 
considered a pastoral. 
But consider the first one and a half lines: 
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs 
Before she saw him . 
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs 
Before she saw him. 
Frost could have stopped right here. This is a poem, this is a drama. Imagine 
those one and a half lines arranged on the page on their own, in the spirit of 
minimalists. This is an extremely loaded scene or, better , a frame. Before you is a 
closed space, a house and two individuals with opposite - no, different - goals. He 
is at the bottom of the stairs; she is at the top. He looks up at her; she, as far as we 
know, does not yet notice his presence at all. It should also be remembered that 
everything is given in black and white . The ladder separating them suggests a 
hierarchy of significances. It is a pedestal on which she is (at least in his eyes) and 
he is at the foot (in our eyes and ultimately in hers). All in sharp perspective. Put 
yourself in any position - preferably in his - and you will see what I mean. Imagine 
that you are following, watching someone, or imagine that you are being watched. 
Imagine that you are interpreting someone's movement - or stillness - without 
being seen . 
In this poem, you can find a huge amount of dramatic details and moments 
conveyed by the author with such accuracy as if he himself experienced them (it is 
assumed that this poem was written on the basis of what happened to Frosto - the 
death of a child). 

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