'TO be or not to be' is a question of choice that permeates all shades of life. The defining feature of imagination, according to Sartre, is the human mind's ability to envision what is not the case. This ability to detach ourselves from our immediate environment and imagine makes us free.
This rigorous dialectic is a key feature of the poetic imagination of Robert Frost. His works communicate his conviction that choice is a fundamental aspect of human life — everything is the result of the choices we make for ourselves concerning, as he calls it in A Boy's Will, 'the trial by existence'.
The speaker of Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,' for example, is caught between the solitary serenity of the woods and the moral responsibilities of an honourable manThe Woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The repetition in the last two lines emphasises the anxiety of freedom of choice. Freedom, says Sartre, is not comfortable the exercise of choice is agonising, escapable only by death. So, even alone in the woods, Frost's character is faced with
obstacles.
Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken' transports us to a sunnier day in a yellow wood with two diverging paths. The speaker is aware he has a choice to make, so he must carefully consider which road to pick and deal with the possible consequences of his decision
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
For Sartre, choosing one option out of many is a solitary endeavour for which no relief can be provided. The same anxiety of solitude arises in 'An Old Man's Winter Night'
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
A light he was to no one but himself.
'Home Burial' presents a more complicated situation involving a couple who have lost their first child. Their marriage is collapsing because both react differently to the death the man accepts it and digs a grave for his child while the woman considers the burial to be representative of her husband's indifference.
In Sartrean terms, the couple is placed in a human condition and choose to act differently. The choice they make determines the course of their lives thereon.
Through the Sartrean light of human freedom we can see that an outwardly confining thing, like the wall in 'Mending Wall', gives us the inward freedom to live our life according to our own choices. The wall represents the inescapable reality of human solitude.
And man can never truly escape the awareness that he is alone, as Frost tells us in 'Desert Places'
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Frost's acceptance of solitude is matched by his refusal to surrender to pessimism. He presents the satisfaction of the freedom to shape one's life in 'West Running Brook' which is a watery symbol of freedom.
Frost tries to reconcile with the world around him while embracing his freedom to do so, an exercise that is apparent in his poetry.
A master of his craft, Robert Frost captures a truth about the human condition within his words which he states explicitly in 'The Tuft of Flowers' 'Men work together/ Whether they work together or apart.'
