Daniel Escamilla
AP Literature and Composition
September 27, 2012
Robert Frost
Education By Poetry: A Meditative Monologue Robert Frost should have incorporated the word "metaphor" into his title to continue the alliteration. In his article, Frost elaborates very much on metaphors and ties it into virtually anything that comes to mind. Frost's purpose in this article is to have his reader think metaphorically and perceive all the metaphors around him/her. Using a variety of techniques, Frost helps relax his reader, exemplifies what he is trying to engrave into the reader's mind, and show prominent references to boost his support and claim. Tone, metaphor, and allusion are three big ingredients in Frost's Meditative Monologue Meal. The tone Frost uses at first in his piece is very humorous. He has an aphorism about Amherst college that sparks a chuckle or two, Frost states, "Or rather say all that is good can be taken as about Amherst; all that is bad will be about other colleges." This statement helps the reader ease into the literary work and appreciate Frost's purpose. The tone then caters to the reader in a different strategic way: poetry understanding. Discussing how to grade an individual's judgement of a poem, Frost seemingly sides with the common student of poetry. He mentions that he is not a sentimentalist but yet he questions why professors limit poetry and grade on precision and accuracy. Frost explains that there is more to poetry than markings, stating "The hard part is the part beyond that, the part where the adventure begins." Frost means that the understanding of a poem is difficult and the true purpose of analyzing poetry is not for a letter or grade. The set up of getting common scholars to feel comfortable with him complements his push on the audience to give poetry, as well as his purpose, a chance. Secondly, the constant use of metaphor to embed the mental process of metaphoric usage and vision is a tactic aggressively used by Frost. He uses common metaphors such as "everything is moving" or "everything is an event" but these are the minimum of Frost's metaphor mania. He relates every aspect of our mortal world to a metaphor, for example, "And somebody very brilliantly quite a while ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything, was like unto a growing thing." Frost then ties metaphors with history, "I heard somebody say yesterday that Aeneas was to be likened unto George Washington." Robert Frost thinks this is a good metaphor to a certain extent, however, as all metaphors reach their limit eventually. Frost touches on the subject that every