Robert Frost Desert Places Analysis: ‘Desert Places’ was composed by Robert Frost in 1933 when he was going through a series of illness and struggling with bouts of depression. Frost stated that he wrote the poem straight off ‘without fumbling a sentence’, which created a long-lasting impression of spiritual bleakness.
The four stanzas in the poem are separated into a set of four lines called quatrains. These quatrains accompany a rhyme scheme of AABA CCDC, changing end sounds in the next two stanzas.
Perhaps the main strategies at play in ‘Desert Places’ are alliteration. It tends to be seen all through the content and happens when words are utilized in progression, or if nothing else, show up near one another, and start with a similar letter. For instance, in the mainline, four words start with “f”. There are different minutes also, for example, “stubble appearing” and “smooth” and “snow” in lines three and four of the principal refrain.
Students can also check the English Summary to revise with them during exam preparation.
By utilizing similar sounding word usage so intensely, Frost can accelerate and hinder the speed at which one peruses the content. It works pair with the rhyme plot and metrical example to impersonate the falling evening and snow speed. A reader is hurried forward, just to be pulled back abruptly to wonder about the void of the land, and in the end, the speaker’s soul.
Summary of Desert Places
In the first stanza, the speaker speaks about what is going around him. Snow is falling quickly; the speaker watches it topping off the field as he passes; he sees that it has nearly – however not exactly – concealed the grass and plants, a couple of tips of the plants stay obvious.
The snow has a place with the encompassing woods, and he envisions the creatures that are sleeping in their homes and tunnels, snoozing under the covering of snow. He doesn’t care for them, he is excessively ‘absent-spirited’, and the way that he’s not participating in the laws of nature in wintertime causes him to feel forlorn.
He muses further on this depression, it’s just the start of winter; thus, he knows throughout the following season, he will begin to feel all the more alone before it improves (before Spring comes and the creatures stir).
He envisions that soon all that will be shrouded completely in snow, a vacancy without any declaration of life. He says the huge vacancy of parts of nature is not startling or threatening to him – he isn’t frightened by the snow’s vacancy, nor by the dull holes between stars in the sky. He is utilized to dejection and vacancy; it exists in him, inside his own psyche and soul – his own ‘desert places’.
Analysis of Desert Places
Stanza One
“Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.”
In the first refrain of the sonnet, the speaker portrays two things that are falling. The “Snow” and the “night” are, in an unexpected way, both tumbling down onto the land. He accentuates, through redundancy, the way that the night is going ahead “fast, oh fast”. These are enthusiastic perceptions that go to the speaker as he is travelling through the snowy scene. He was in a field and going ahead as soon as he saw how the ground was nearly “covered…/in the snow”.
There was such a great amount on the ground that it had streamlined everything, at any rate. The unadulterated whiteness presently couldn’t seem to cloud a “few of weeds and stubble” of grasses and furrowed land standing up. These were the remainder of all the other things covered up under the layer of snow. It has gone to the land quick, cleared out, outwardly, at any rate, the majority of the varieties in the ground.
Stanza two
“The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.”
The shortfall of vegetation, or whatever else but snow, causes the speaker to think about the remainder of his general surroundings. He noticed that the “woods around it have it” and that “it is theirs”. This isn’t abnormal, considering the measure of snow and how it has changed the ground. The fierce word “smothered” is utilized in line two, implying that the snow isn’t helping the creatures. It is smoothing them out also, driving them down into their “lairs” where it is dim and from which, now, there will never be a way out.
The feels of absence, compaction, and covering are likewise affecting the speaker. He turns around internal the third line to express that he is similarly “absent spirited” as the remainder of the world appears. The feeling is essential for his body. It has transformed him in manners that are too various to even think about tallying. His depression right now is solid to such an extent that he doesn’t exactly have the foggiest idea of managing it. It found him off guard.
Stanza 3
“And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less–
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.”
It isn’t very certain for a reader to overcome this sonnet without understanding that forlornness is the main topic. In the third verse, Frost’s speaker utilizes the word multiple times. He returns to what he was saying previously, noting that he said he was very lonely. He adds onto this that he is simply going to “be more lonely” before it “will be less”. His loneliness isn’t finished with him yet, and he’s set up to get more settled in the whiteness and covering thickness of the snow before help comes.
Frost’s speaker is driven further into melancholy as he notices the snow for more. Utilizing alliteration with the redundancy of the letters “b” and “n” depicts how there is literally nothing to the scene. All that was once there had been annihilated. There are no articulations (in the land or himself), nor is there anything to “express”.
Stanza 4
“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare me with my own desert places.”
Even though the speaker has been influenced by the landscape around him and reminded of his own inner turmoil, it is not the non-appearance inherent in the snow that disturbs him so much. In the last stanza, he admits that “They” are trying to frighten him “with their empty spaces”. Yet he adds it is not working. It may be empty “Between” and “on” the stars, but there are much emptier places within the speaker’s mind. He has his own desert places to cope with.
