18 pages • 36 minutes read
Robert FrostA Time To Talk
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1972A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Form
The form here is deceptively simple. Despite being part of a generation of poets who disdained the inherited conventions of tight form, that is rhythm and rhyme itself, and endorsed the daring exploration into open verse, Frost never rejected the structure of poetic form. The ten-line poem is made up of two sentences. The first states the problem; a friend approaches along the road and hails the speaker for a chat, and the second (beginning at Line 6) responds to the problem and offers a simple solution, stop working and enjoy an interlude away from chores to feel the rich reward of simple human contact.
What is of interest in the form Frost selects is the apparently casual rhyme scheme. Known for tightly constructed formal poetry that worked around and with a clear and steadying rhyme scheme, this poem at first read seems carelessly open, dangerously free, just like the open road.
The rhyme scheme that defines the form is subtle, yes, but it is there. It is unconventional—ABCADBCEED—but it is there. The rhyming scheme defines a poem as carelessly lackadaisical, as wonderfully unscripted as the conversation these two New Englanders are about to have. The routine, that is the onerous work of hoeing a field, is still endorsed in the fact that the poem has a form. But slyly Frost endorses as well breaking that tight constraining form by freeing the rhyme scheme to an apparently chaotic form. How best to use form to celebrate formlessness, how better to endorse both the virtue of work and the giddy freedom of breaking routine than to have a (de)constructed form?
Meter
For Frost, nothing better reflected the mission of a poet than to craft the often clumsy and stumbly English language into the sculptured metrics of a line of poetry. The discipline of poetry itself was expressed in the poet’s ability to find in the careful pattern of meter the reward of reading poetry. Meter made poetry memorable, aided in recitation, and reassured the reader that here was a crafted thing even as the poet aimed to make the carefully crafted lines, with their patterning, seem effortless and natural.
The prime directive, however, was to fuse sound and sense, to make the poem’s meter reflect the poem’s thematic argument rather than counting off beats and matching up syllables for its own sake. In this, the meter of “A Time for a Talk” expresses the idea the poem endorses of the value of time off, the value of down time stolen from the routine.
Because there is abundant evidence in Frost’s poetry of his ability to master difficult and often tricky meters, the fact that “A Time for a Talk” appears to have no sustaining, self-generating and self-justifying, meter suggests he was about something different. The dominant meter is iambic tetrameter, ten syllables per line in units of DUH-duh. But that is irregularly violated by lines with six beats, others with 8. It is chaos or it is rigidly disciplined meter to match the ad-libbed premise of the poem itself, the sudden and unexpected break from work represented by the arrival of the friend.
Voice
The speaker is a farmer tasked with the overwhelming responsibility of hoeing lots of open field, digging lines of shallow trenches that would later be seeded. The work, all done by hand, was onerous, backbreaking, and tedious. The speaker sees the approach of the passing friend as an opportunity to lay down the hoe (or more specifically thrust the implement into the ground) and indulge a time apart from the loneliness and drudgery of the task at hand for an interlude of human connection, a conversation about nothing that means everything.
It is tempting to use autobiography to identify the voice. After all, at the time of the poem’s composition, Frost was not that much removed from his own tenure as a New England farmer, specifically a chicken farmer, albeit the experience was something of a disaster (perhaps a reflection of his preference, which he conceded years later, to chat over attending to the obligations of farming).
The speaker, if not Frost himself, is a typical farmer facing the enormous obligations of that line of work convincing himself that it would be simply rude not to take a moment to chat. I can’t ignore the opportunity for a visit, he tells himself, an internal debate that applies not merely to Frost the failed farmer but to any workplace unit of human resource who sees in the chance conversation with any coworker a way to make a job more tenable and the workplace more human.
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
