Meeting and Passing - Critical Appreciation/Analysis - Robert Frost

{tocify} $title={Table of Contents}

Introductory

Robert Frost takes his "ordinary" meeting with a woman to the next level in the very poem. The poem was published in the poetic collection entitled as "Mountain Intervals", most probably in 1916. The poem deals with confrontation and then the departure of a lady with the poet himself. This sonnet is considered as the first record of "mingling" of identities as being engaged in a lovely relationship.

 

Development of Thoughts

The Sonnet beings with the poet coming down from the hills. His vision is startled by the living image of a girl.

 

As I went down the hill along the wall

There was a gate I had leaned as for the view

And had just turned from when I first saw you

 

Then he silently greets his beloved. Each one is heading towards his and her destination. The poet comes down the hill while the girl comes up the hill; her parasol separating the lover from beloved.

 

Themes

The first obvious theme in the particular sonnet is already entitled by T. S. Eliot but we have to interpret it upside-down as "arrival and departure". Because it is a sonnet, it indicates the first initial meeting and passing. The question is, what makes us meet and what makes us pass. Man is usually bewitched by the beauty of his opposite sex (woman) while there are some misunderstandings between the two, either enforced by circumstances or by the society itself, which works like a "parasol shadow" to separate the lovers.

 

Figurative Beauty

Like many other poems by Robert Frost, this poem also holds many symbolic meanings, waiting for its readers to discover. The girl's climbing up the hill signifies her initial step on the stairs of love while the poet's going down the hill denotes the final descendance from the stairs of love. Hill symbolizes the lofty myth of being someone's someone in a love line. The girl's parasol serves as a "decimal point" which separates the beloveds just as digits are detached.

 

But more than one yet. Your parasol

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust

 

Setting and Imagery

This sonnet is portrayed in a rural-hilly area somewhere in New-Hampshire. The poem holds solid imagery of a mountain, gate, foot-prints and, most importantly, the poet and his beloved. Such apt use striking imagery signifies the lyrical uniqueness among other sonnets.

 

Structure and Metre

This poem is composed in fourteen lines, so, it is a sonnet: but not a typical one. In this sonnet, Robert Frost follows two giants in English Poetry. As one critic has pointed out that its octave is Miltonic while its sestet is Shakespearean. So, there is a taste of Italian pizza as well as English apples. This sonnet exhibits an odd rhythmic metre too. It is iambic hexametre in the Italian octave and iambic pentameter in the English sestet (that is my own assumption and I might be wrong). The rhyme scheme of the particular sonnet is abcaabcd efef gg.

 

Conclusion

"Meeting and Passing" is a beautiful sonnet on love which earnestly highlights the joining and separating aspects of love. Frost has given us a hint. Now it is on us to discover what separates and what enjoins the lovers.