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.
Themes
The Need for Others
It is tempting, on first read, to find in Frost’s narrative a simple endorsement of friends, quaint and folksy as an old-school Pepperidge Farm commercial. After all, the speaker describes the conversation he is about to have as a “friendly visit” (Line 10), which is of course not the same thing as a visit between friends. The reader wants the two to be good friends. After all, the genre of so-called hospitality poems was a major expression of poetry in both Victorian England and in Gilded Age America, poems that celebrated the uncomplicated support and love between friends and that offered inspirational, uplifting reminders of the virtue of others.
But Frost is, well, too much Frost to allow such a theme to go unquestioned. The two characters in the poem are never given a context, never given backstories, indeed never even given genders or names. There is really no reliable textual evidence to define the level of their friendship or even who they are—Is this a good friend? An acquaintance? A neighbor? A relative? A stranger hailing him for directions? Their conversation begins just after the poem ends—so there is no way, at least textually, to define this relationship.
Frost creates the ambiguity to give the poem its widest possible thematic reach. The poem can be read as not an endorsement of friendship or neighborliness or even love—but rather an endorsement of the idea of others. The speaker, committed to work and to hoeing row after row for his farm, is unexpectedly gifted with the presence of another, unnamed and undefined but valuable because he/she is someone else, a presence to populate what is otherwise an oppressive emptiness. It is a measure of the loneliness of readers themselves that we project friendship onto this slender moment of conversation. We want friendship to be affirmed because like the speaker/farmer we live in a world so busy we can ignore the hard reality that busyness does not warm the heart, busyness does not endow life with purpose. Thus, Frost gives us a moment to share with the speaker and to feel the reward of another without demanding that the poem treat specific relationships or even specific characters. It is a familiar Frost meditation: we are random matter suspended in a cosmic darkness, and, our fellow humans are all we have.
The Limited Rewards of Work
For Frost’s generation, the idea of work was becoming more and more dehumanizing as the world edged away from the hands-on rewards of agrarian life outside in nature and toward the increasingly depersonalizing kind of work that defined the emerging urban culture. Work became increasingly separated from inspiration, creativity, individuality, and freedom. Work became associated with factories, sprawling industrial complexes designed to maximize productivity and minimize worker influence, where individuals and individuality itself became increasingly irrelevant.
Frost, from his position in the rural Outback of New Hampshire, was no fool—he understood the implications of soul-numbing work in the cities and how work can overcome and ultimately destroy the spirit. Thus, the poem reconstructs the idea of farm labor—the man is hoeing a seemingly endless stretch of hills—as little more than the rural equivalent of factory work. The speaker understands it is important to do but also sees the opportunity for connection and meaning, both in work and in spite of it.
The poem suggests that work finds its way to value only in the context of human contact and a well-rounded day. Work, the poem argues, will always be there, always be waiting. If the speaker allows himself to, the work ahead of him (the range of unhoed hills all around him) would frustrate him and depress him. With the occasion of this Significant Other, however, he suddenly realizes with a soul-saving relief that there is always “time to talk” (Line 6).
The Tonic Effect of Communication
Ultimately the poem endorses the value of communication and the reward of finding a way to connect with others through the vehicle of talking. The speaker indicates a simple wave to the passing friend would not suffice. Nor could he conceive as appropriate not talking at all but rather signaling the unplowed land all around him as justification for not talking at all.
Frost posits that something in us needs others and needs to be validated by the simplest act of a conversation. This is not a love poem, this is not an affirmation of family or friendship. It is a celebration of the need we have for the simple blessing of the voice of another to crack a light in our soft prison of dark isolation. Without conversation, the poem paints a bleak and very 20th-century existential universe: a lonely figure endlessly working. That Sisyphean vision of modern life finds resonance in other Frost poems from the same collection, namely the narrative of the pointless accidental death of a child after mishandling a buzz saw (“Out, Out—"), the desperate need to affirm purpose in what are otherwise blindly made life-decisions (“The Road Not Taken”), and the futile struggle of the earthbound to touch the transcendent (“Birches”).
Frost cannot concede to the darkness, cannot allow the logic of despair to be the last word. Here he ushers us to the stone wall where the two people meet, where the conversation dispels the cloaking loneliness of the 20th-century. As long as we can find our way to others and affirm the reality of our presence through the confirmation of those others, we need never be as isolated as we know in our darkest moments we are. With God argued into irrelevance, love exposed as an unreliable cheat, we cling to the relevance of friends who linger along our stone walls.
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
