Home Burial

In his first book, A Boy’s Will, Frost often used elevated 19th-century language to express his thoughts. In one of the last poems in the collection, “A Tuft of Flowers,” Frost used more colloquial language that was commonplace amongst those in New England. When he wrote North of Boston, he primarily used this type of speech, while still employing iambic pentameter and blank verse. Frost’s blending of the old (iambic blank verse) with the new (everyday speech and location) was innovative for the time, creating poems that sounded epic yet familiar. The couple’s fraught dialogue regarding their son’s death has both an intimacy due to its domestic subject and a timelessness due to the even meter, despite the occasional deviations that critics point out. Katherine Kearns, for instance, has noted, “of the husband's forty-nine lines, fifteen are extrasyllabic; of the wife’s forty-one lines, seventeen are extrasyllabic” and how these differences are “used by Frost within the dialogue to reveal the uncontrol and frustration of both husband and wife” (Kearns, Katherine. “On ‘Home Burial.’” Modern American Poetry).