A Study Guide for Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Robert Frost's "The Wood-Pile," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535840644

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The Wood-Pile

Robert Frost

1914

Introduction

The Wood-Pile was originally published in 1914 in North of Boston, which was Robert Frost’s second book of verse and the one that developed the author’s distinctive character—that of a New England country gentleman. The poem is probably not one of the top five most-discussed poems of Robert Frost, but it surely is in the top ten, and out of the hundreds of poems produced during a career that spanned fifty years, that is a distinction. It was written, according to Frost, in Derry, New Hampshire, where he lived as a farmer and schoolteacher before any of his poems were published. Like his other poems written during this period, The Wood-Pile deals with nature and loneliness, and it implies a greater overall purpose in the world that cannot be directly explained, only felt. What is distinct about Frost’s early poems is the eerie sense of life’s isolation. In The Wood-Pile the speaker is out in the cold wooded country, with nature, represented by the small bird, being wary of the speaker, and the speaker uneasy to suddenly realize himself to be far from home, with his feet falling through the hard snow.

Author Biography

Robert Frost was born in 1874 and lived in New England for practically his entire life. He was covaledictorian of his high-school class along with Elinor White, whom he married three years later (their marriage lasting until her death fifty-three years later). Frost attended Dartmouth College in 1892, but dropped out after two months; he also attended Harvard between 1897 and 1899, but he never graduated from there, either. From 1900 to 1912, he lived on a farm on Derry, New Hampshire, that his grandfather had brought for him, raising chickens and sometimes teaching at the local