Frost
In the works “For Once, Then, Something,” “Desert Places,” “Design,” and “Acquainted with the Night,” Frost takes the concrete aspect of nature and illustrates things that are abstract such as rejuvenation, isolation, feelings about fate or destiny, and loneliness. He portrays to us that nature may not always be, as we perceive it.
In “Desert Places” Frost uses nature to mirror the feelings of man. The sand is of a white color which is opposite of reality. The snow and the night are descending together. The black and white is working together to muffle sensation and obliterate perception. As the snow piles on, obliterating all distinction, the field becomes an inanimate, dead thing, unmarked by, and unreflective of, the care of man, the very thing that gave it its positive identity as a field. “All the animals are smothered in their lairs” (1012). This is figured as death, the ultimate thing that smothers all life, leaving the persona alone. Confronted with the deadness, the persona finds that he, too, is “absent-spirited” (1012) and “included” in the loneliness. The “blanker whiteness of benighted snow”(1013) truly has “nothing to express”(1013).
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