Robert Frost's use of imagery in his poems is skillful and meaningful. The imagery is characterized by two salient attributes-playfulness and anthropomorphism. His images are, as Martin Bidney calls them, "secretive-playful epiphanies" that sometimes reflect solitude, other times companionship, and usually "the ambivalent imagination" (1). At the same time, Frost's images are anthropomorphic, ascribing human traits to trees, leaves, and other elements of nature in a manner that unites the non-human entities of nature with their human counterparts.
In "A Prayer in the Spring," for example, Frost's playfulness manifests in thoughts of "happy bees" and "perfect trees," which he equates with love, asserting that "nothing else is love" (line 13). Frost's "ambivalent imagination" in this poem is that of a man enjoying thoughts of love and nature and urging his reader to enjoy the moment rather than "to think so far away as the uncertain harvest" (lines 2-3). The flowers represent the evanescence of the moment, which will soon be lost forever if not enjoyed at once, and the happy bees swarming around the perfect trees are experiences that can bring pleasure in the moment. Frost's images of happy creatures and perfect nature send the underlying message that nature itself is happy and that one can join in with and enjoy that happiness if one takes the time to contemplate nature rather than thinking ahead to some nebulous future time and missing the present moment.
In his poem "In Hardwood Groves," Frost uses anthropomorphism to lend a bit of the human to elements of nature. The leaves that are "put beneath the feet of dancing flowers" (line 10) are busy falling from the trees, "fit[ting] the earth like a leather glove" (line 4), and then mounting up again "to fill the trees with another shade" (line 6), as though they were workers tasked with an important assignment. Frost uses these images to intimate that ...