A Flight of Stairs in “Home Burial”

Robert Frost is very good at using metaphors in his poems. The employment of metaphors endows his poems with rich emotions and thought, which is probably what Frost calls “emotion has found thought and thought has found words”. The loss of a child, in “Home Burial”, brings about the vastly different views of the husband and wife towards family, love, and children. The half-shut and half-open door is often taken as an example by scholars to symbolize the deadlock the couple is in. In fact, that flight of stairs is also symbolic of the separation and isolation of this couple. The setting of the poem is the staircase of the house, which will show how the position of the husband and wife in relation to the stairs influences their right of speech.