18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostA Time To Talk
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Unhoed Hills
The hills waiting to be plowed by the speaker represent the oppressive reality of work, the unending obligation to take care of business that every adult faces in Frost’s time and today. The hills symbolize the job never finished, the self-perpetuating, self-sustaining, self-justifying to-do list, and how such obligation becomes a torment.
It is not that the speaker is lazy or even delinquent in tending to his farm. But even as the speaker works diligently, he is but a single person manning a single hoe. And within the wider perspective, once he concludes this year’s hoeing, another year’s hoeing will await, and then another, and then another. The speaker knows he must work, that the pause here for a conversation will not lighten his burden at all. It is a zero-sum proposition: the same amount of work will be there after he takes a moment to engage this passing figure in a bit of conversation. When he thrusts his hoe, blade up, into the ground, it is a moment of defiance, the lonely soul asserting, even for a moment, his right to be free of the dreary burden and endless responsibilities of work if only for a moment’s chat.
The Road
“A friend calls to me from the road,” the poem opens by placing the speaker at a distance from the road. That sense of distance is critical to understanding the tragedy of the speaker. If the untilled hills symbolize the reality of work, which isolates people from each other as well as from the fullest enjoyment of life, the road that borders the farm and upon which the friend comes down represents the very life abandoned to pursue work. The road calls to the speaker so intent on the grim work of hoeing the fields, literally as he hears the voice of the stranger but metaphorically as well: the road represents adventure, risk, travel, surprise, spontaneity, and uncertainty.
Beyond the carefully symmetrical, tidy plow lines is the beckoning road, winding, turning, following a logic of its own, so close and yet so far away. Frost often used the symbol of the open road to suggest the curiously, wonderfully unplanned way that life moves and the temerity it takes to follow that road. By contrast, the speaker tracing those predictable plow lines behind the tediously slow-moving horse is safely imprisoned, the entire farm lined by stone walls. Frost suggests a time-out at the wall will only be that; the speaker has not the fortitude, the emotional resilience, or unshakeable self-esteem necessary to forgo the life of commonplace work and find out the truest experiences of life. He will not step out onto the road but will momentarily assuage his anxiety alongside its beckoning openness.
The Stone Wall
If the poem can be read symbolically, then the unhoed fields symbolize the endless demands of work and routine, the road symbolizes adventure, connection, and risk, and the stone wall symbolizes the inevitable limits of life and the separation between work and living. “I go up to the stone wall / For a friendly visit” (Lines 9-10): that one moment, away from the plowing and close to the open road is, for the speaker in that moment, enough.
In the end, the stone wall provides a more practical service. The stone wall curtails the speaker’s flight of fancy and reminds the speaker that hoeing is critical. Somebody has to plow the fields. The speaker, nor the poem, can simply abandon the responsibilities of work. The fields must be plowed, despite the grim and oppressive routine of it. Frost is no dreamer—his years spent trying to run a farm impressed him with the demands of farming and the need to maintain that level of dedication. The wall then gently keeps the speaker in, reminds him that returning to the job at hand is imperative. Relish the visit, the interlude with its spirit of human contact, but let that visit reanimate the inevitable return to the hoe. In this the wall symbolizes the necessary dedication to work, the limits of freedom, and the need for others.
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