A Critical Analysis of Robert Frost Poems

Abstract

Many a Frostean poem poses a question and presents two points of view. In some, Frost slants the argument in favour of one viewpoint, by using an allusion. But the allusion is so implicit that it escapes the attention of the reader, leaving him with the feeling that the poem is ambivalent because the poet has not decided the argument one way of the other. Such is the case in “The Ax-Helve”. It is an argument about “natural” education and academic education between the narrator and his neighbor. Baptiste, the neighbor, argues that the knowledge his children gain naturally from experience is far more valuable than the bookish knowledge “laid-on” artificially in schools. To him, the ex-helve is a symbol of natural education, by virtue of its built-in curves “native to the grain”. After trimming it, he stands the helve “Erect but now without its waves, as when” the snake stood up for evil in the Garden”. The allusion is to that moment in Milton’s “Paradise Lost” when man, prompted by the Serpent, ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Because of man’s disobedience of God, this has been called “evil”, which Milton held to. It is good because it is what embarked man on the human process of acquiring knowledge for himself, through his own experience. The implication of the allusion is that nonacademic experience offers a better and more valid education because it is “natural” human activity. Thus the poem resolves the question. But the implication of this allusion is so covert that it escapes the reader, making him treat the poem ambivalent.