world war 2
The theme of “Home Burial”, by Robert Frost, is the misunderstanding between a husband and a wife because of feelings they show as a result of tragedy. The wife cannot handle the way her husband has dealt with the loss of their child, and the husband wishes for his wife to quit mourning. She is convinced that her husband no longer cares about the death of their child. However, this is not true. The husband simply takes a separate approach when mourning over his child, while his wife grieves openly. She wishes to leave her home because she can not bear to look at her child’s grave, yet she wants her husband to console her. The poem itself deals with the tragedy in life by centering on their child’s death, but, in reality, the husband’s and wife’s misunderstanding of each others attitudes causes their relationship to falter. The poem begins with the husband and the wife standing in the stairwell, and all of the action of the poem occurs here. The husband is at the bottom while the wife is at the top about to come down, when she looks out the window and sees her child’s grave. The husband is taken by the wife’s astonishment and goes up to see what it is she is staring at. At first he does not see his child’s grave, but then realizes it and says, “I’ve never noticed it from here before.” By the husband’s statement, we realize that he has tried very hard to forget his child’s death. He has never noticed the cemetery from the stairwell before, which tells us that he must not think about his child’s death much anymore, maybe in an effort to try to forget the death. His wife, however, seems to have noticed the child’s grave from every window in the house, probably because she always dwells on the death.