Home Burial Essay, Research Paper

Home Burial

The theme of Home Burial by Robert Frost is the missunderstanding between a husband and a wife. The wife can t handle the way that her husband has dealt with the death of their baby. The wife feels that her husband doesn t even care about the death of their baby. This is not true the husband just deals with his pain in different ways.

One example of this is at the beginning of the poem when the husband finds the wife sitting on the stairs looking over her shoulder out the window. She was looking out the window because she was looking at the burial site of her baby. The husband asked his wife what she was looking at and she would not tell him. She was upset at the fact that he did not know what was out the window. She took him not know as a sign that he did not car. This is not true. The real reason for this is because they both have different cultural rolls. The husband is a farmer witch requires him to be up before the sun and to come in after it goes down. Due to this fact he was never able to view what was out the window because it was always dark when he was walking by it. The wife on the other hand has the role of a house wife. Due to this fact she is constantly walking by the window at the top of the stairs being forced to look out the window.

Another part were there is a misunderstanding between husband and wife is when the husband sits down after getting finished with the burial of the baby. After burreing the baby he sits down and says Three foggy mornings and one rainy day can rot the best birch fence a man can build. His wife took these words as a sign of him not caring about the fact that he had just buried their baby. In reality this statement made by the husband is being related to the casket that held the body of the baby. Poirer coments clearly , she can not say it all because her grievances are not and cannot be the equivalent of her grief and so she necessarily rejects what to her cannot help but sound like condescension.