"Home Burial," written in 1914, presents an engrossing, intensely empathetic scenario. The title suggests both a home graveyard and a household buried in unrequited grief. In the action, a perplexed husband asks his wife to "let me into your grief," perhaps a reference to Elinor Frost's devastation at the death of son Elliott. In the poem's fictional setting, the husband responds to his mournful wife's inability to cope with the death of their child by putting up a false cover of business as usual. Departing the confines of blank verse through extensive enjambment, the carry-over lines and double caesuras ["-how could you?-"] press the poem's two main characters into a halting, real-life confrontation. Added to this personal drama is the couple's view through the upstairs window of a fresh burial plot that stands out among older gravestones. The husband, who resents his wife's refusal to share her suffering with him, defuses a confrontation by sitting at the top of the stairs while his wife frowns her disapproval.
To buoy his 116-line poem, Frost elaborates on the husband's and wife's motivations for their behavior. At the heart of the domestic confrontation is the indelicate word "rot," which the husband, carelessly utters after digging an infant-sized grave. The wife, named "Amy" (from the Latin word for love), uses her emotions about her child's death as a weapon against her husband — and, ironically, against herself. Given to stiff-necked silence and withdrawal, she threatens to abandon him in order to escape their separate emotional difficulties in dealing with death. The pacing refuses to drop to a mutually satisfying resolution as the husband, whose muscular hand dug the hole and mounded the gravel, resorts to force if need be to keep his marriage from disintegration and public shame. The realism of harsh words hanging in the air suggests a situation that Frost had witnessed or been party to — perhaps his own troubled marriage to a tight-lipped woman or an anticipation of the marital difficulties of his daughters.
