frost Flashcards
hymnal metrically and central conceit of ‘the frost of death’ and ‘passive flower
HM composed of common metre with full rhymes + personified death, identifying with the rhythm and thematically aspects of S1 in ‘Because’ which also personifies death. seen in Romantic poets, belies and gives poignant force to speaker’s panic and resistantance of icy death. Throughout the poem, the speaker grapples with the inevitability of death and rages against the proposition that one must accept death.
-Central conceit of Death (masc)= frost, which in botanical terms is the cold assassin and life (fem)= ‘passive flower’
‘secure your flower’
command = connotations characterise death as imperious and taunting
‘like soldiers fighting with a leak, we fought mortality’
militaristic simile could present ‘leak’ as a natural symbol of death, a seeping cold reality spreading through vulnerable spaces, such as the flower, adding to the characterisation of death not being benign like Death, but rather hostile. and inclusive pronoun ‘we’ struggle all humanity face.
‘To sea… To mountain… to the sun’ + ‘to crawl the frost begun’
Anaphora (repitition) = speaker attempts to enlist the assistance of nature when reviving the flower, using fullness of the ‘sea’, rich verdancy of the ‘mountain’ and restorative warmth of life giving ‘sun. Change of direction ‘yet even’ endorses the speakers disappointment as the enjambment and inversion ‘to crawl the frost begun’ find nature even in her benevolent form to be impassive in the face of humanity’s plight to fight mortality.
Addition of extra line in S3 and lack of dashes + dynamic verbs of ‘pried’ and ‘wedged’ and departure from full rhyme in line 9 and 10
renders speakers futile attempt to ‘wedge’ themselves between Frost and flower + kinetic verbs= desperate physical effort to resist death. departure from full rhyme= assist stanza to stage a metrical and literal revolt against deaths cold grip.
‘easy as the narrow snake, he forked’
death easily breaches all defences ‘forked’= malicious, serpentine connotations. death in nature = masculine and phallic imager -> speaker rails against death but also all encompassing patriarchal strictures inimical to female liberation. Stanza one and two act to reveal the speakers desperate attempt top prevent death, resulting in discovery of deaths brutal inevitability and the hospitality in nature + failure of romantic and transcentalist philosophical traditions which would remove the sting of death.
‘beauty bent’
(moves from struggle to impotent rage) flowers fragile beauty and sudden assassination (disfiguring connotations ‘bent’ and plosive sounds accentuates the frost’s brutality
‘We hunted him to his ravine/ we chased him to his den’
dramatises vengeful pursuit of death / death becomes the monster and retreats to cavernous spaces within nature (death=inextricable part nature)
‘we hated death and hated life’
paralelism of death= inextricable part life/ hatred + bitter resetment of speaker having to accept this fact
‘Then Sea and continent there is a larger, it is woe’
ironic simile Woe= larger all nature’s (presumably eternal +benign) processes Ironic (+protomodern) bc distress of single and transient psychology= increased painful and significant than anything eternal. therefore D gives voice to and affirms the suffering of a human speaker, who like the ‘passive flower’, must accept the brutality of the universe and god which requires them to die.
