(1) Apply Frost’s vision of childhood in “Birches” to the realistic details of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree.” Then determine how retrospect clouds the speaker’s memory of the loneliness of a country boy living too far from town to play baseball, but how, in his isolation, he made a one-person game of swinging on trees.
(2) Analyze the complex shift from strict pentameter in Frost’s “Fire and Ice.” Contrast the compression of lines, rhymes, and enjambment with the more leisurely vernacular of the verse dramas “The Death of the Hired Man” and “Home Burial.”
(3) Determine why the patriotism and dynamics of “The Gift Outright” suited the stirring public occasion of John F. Kennedy’s January 1961 presidential inauguration. Select other appropriate works of Frost’s canon that would ennoble a formal state occasion.
(4) Contrast the quirky logic of Frost’s “Departmental: The End of My Ant Jerry” with the straightforward contemplation of death in “Out, Out-” and “Fire and Ice.” Compare Frost’s style of humor with that of Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Cornelia Otis Skinner, or Edward Lear.
(5) Discuss the husband and wife’s relationship in “Home Burial.” Is one character more at fault than the other for the couple’s inability to communicate meaningfully?
