“Home Burial” is a great story shining light on the topic of child loss and the consequences that many families have to cope with. It also deals with topics that everyone comes across during their life and it is easy to understand. If you are interested in the content and some of the themes then keep reading!

Summary
The poem “Home Burial” was published in 1914 and written by Robert Frost. It mostly consists of a dialogue between a wife and her husband who have recently buried their child. The poem is about the grief both of the parents experience and how differently they deal with it. The loss of their child causes them to clash and fight about the way they mourn.

Title
After finishing the poem you might come to the realization that the title has a double meaning behind it. While “home burial” refers to the burial of their son in the graveyard behind their house, it can also be associated with the death of their shared love and their marriage, which is falling apart at their common home.

The pain of miscommunication
Miscommunication is a present topic in the poem by Robert Frost. The couple doesn’t understand each other and doesn’t try to in the first place. The miscommunication seems to destroy their marriage more than the shared grief they experience. Both of them ignore the others feelings and perspectives and invalidate them. While the wife repeatedly asks her husband to drop the subject of their child he completely ignores her plea. On the other side, the husband wants to talk about it and is searching for the right words but the wife thinks there is no way to put her pain into words. Furthermore, the husband accuses his wife of “overdo[ing] it a little” with her grief, while she accuses him of not mourning enough. During the entire monologue, the couple talks past each other and neither of them is trying to understand the other’s feelings. This causes them to drift and leads to them fighting in the end which is why the wife wants to get away. Her wanting to leave the house, the place where her husband is and where their child is buried, is symbolic of her wanting to escape the relationship and the grief she connects it to.

Gender Roles
The characters in the poem are conforming to old-fashioned stereotyped gender roles. While the husband takes on the dominant role and doesn’t show any emotion, the wife is portrayed as emotional. The characters themselves deeply believe in those stereotypes and use them as arguments in their fight. The husband explains his lack of emotion with “A man must partly give up being a man […] with women folk” while the wife invalidates his grief by saying “I don’t know rightly whether any man can [grief as much as a mother]”. Through the gender roles, both of them make assumptions about the other which stops them from communicating correctly. It is clear to the reader that their difference in gender is not the reason for their failed communication, even though the couple puts the blame on it.

Historical context
In his lifetime Robert Frost experienced both world wars, the great depression and the civil rights movement. Being published in 1914, at the start of World War One, the topics of death, grief and miscommunication in the poem directly connect to the terror of the war. WW1 started with the assassination of the Austro- Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdin which led to many young soldiers dying. The image of losing a son thus became very present, which Frost addresses in his work.

I definitely recommend reading the entire story and analyzing the content further. I hope this little insight into one of Robert Frost’s works has been interesting!