Imagery in the Poetry of Robert Frost

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 mo

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has left an indelible impact on the leaves, casting them in a shape that they have still retained even after the water has evaporated (line 9). The water's bed like "a faded paper sheet" is reminiscent of a human bed with sheets, except that the brook's bed is formed of "dead leaves stuck together by the heat," an image that captures the heavy and relentless heat of summer (line 11). Like the previous poem, this one bears the suggestion of the cycle of nature and the stamp of eternity, particularly in the line, "A brook to none but who remember long," which ends with "brooks taken otherwhere in song" (lines 12, 14). Like a human being whose happy memories are in the past and who has now been left shaped by the force of life that coursed in younger days, the brook is dried up and joins the other brooks "taken otherwhere," a phrase that connotes going to heaven. Frost's poem "A Brook in the City" casts the brook again in an anthropomorphic light, along with the farmhouse, which "lingers" and is "averse to square" but "has to wear a number" (lines 1-3). The brook "that held the house as in an elbow-crook" brings to mind a suitor holding his beloved in the crook of his arm (Frost, line 4). Moreover, Frost states that

Category: Literature - I