The literary concept of poetry is one of the most challenging aspects in terms of encoding the writer’s intentions and ideas behind the lines, especially when analyzed decades after their first publications. A prime example of such a challenge would be the poems written by Robert Frost, an American poet of the early 20th century. His seemingly unsophisticated poems trick the reader into not digging all the actual sense hidden in the plain words and easily perceived rhyming. His work Out, Out, which was published in 1916, bears a completely understandable plot that describes the accidental death of a boy caused by the saw. However, when looking deeper into the semantic peculiarities of the poem, one might find various symbols and questions to ponder. For example, the following lines urge the reader to define what was meant behind the boy giving a hand to the saw, implying the symbolic meaning of the boy’s early necessity to befriend labor to survive:
“Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting” (Frost 1)
Thus, quite frequently, seemingly plain texts are to be put into either historical or contrastive perspective to be fully comprehended. Thus, William Blake’s poems The Tyger and The Lamb are to be discussed in terms of a symbolic symbiosis, reflecting on God’s creation of good and evil, struggling to find both roots and salvations of the universal imbalance. Moreover, these aspects were divided into two poems for the reader to reflect on these phenomena in isolation, trying to define how both tenderness and evil tend to exist and develop within a human being.
Other authors, however, tend to find what drives people to choose their guide throughout life, thinking about the slightest change that might make people change in a blink of an eye. Thus, Thomas Wolfe’s The Child by Tiger is centered around the story of an ordinary kind man who suddenly becomes an outrageous human who takes the lives of nine people. The metamorphosis is described in such a way that it is the reader’s task to conclude the potential causes of such an unprecedented event.
Work Cited
Frost, Robert. Out, Out. Poetry Foundation, 1969. Poetry Foundation, Web.