Modern Social Science Research

For centuries, writers have been writing about human tragedies caused by lack of communication, and Frost is no exception. However, Frost also wrote hopefully about the possibility of successful communication between people. Frost’s poetry discusses the relationships between man and others, man and self, man and nature, man and life, with a considerable amount of poetry dealing with love and marriage. Frost once said that all of his poems are love poems. He writes about pure love, boiling love, lost love, as well as mature marriages and failed marriages. This paper focuses on two poems in North of Boston that depict the predicament of couples— “Home Burial” and “The Death of the Hired Man”. The predicament in “Home Burial” is occasioned by the different ways the couple bear the grief of their lost child, while the predicament in “The Death of the Hired Man” is caused by the couple’s different views on whether an old worker who has lost his ability to work and betrayed his promise should return to the hirer’s home during the off-season. Through the different ways the couples cope with difficulties in these two poems, this paper aims to explore how couples can get along with each other through a hard time, and Frost’s attitude towards life in face of difficulties.

Predicament; Reconciliation; “Home Burial”; “The Death of the Hired Man”; Comparative analysis