Robert Frost is a well known American poet often associated with beautiful
scenes from the New England area. However, the deeper meanings of his poems is often
overlooked by their reader, many critics use words such as loneliness, anguish and
frustration to describe some of Frost's famous poems. In the poem "Come In", Frost tells
about the change from day to night and makes a parallel statement about stepping over the
edge of life into death. The poem is filled with images of darkness, which becomes a
symbol of death, and music from songbirds, which help to build a chaotic scene. The
speaker seems to have a feeling of anxiety and a certain sense of awe toward the situation
taking place in the poem. These feelings help display the poems overall theme that nature
and life itself has a mysteriousness to it that should not be taken lightly.
In the first stanza the speaker immediately makes reference to the boarder between
light and dark. The edge of the woods is a boarder between the nighttime of the inside
and the light of the outside as the speaker states in lines 3 and 4. The "Thrush music" (line
2) sets a mysterious scene from the very beginning. The man standing at the edge of the
woods notices the music coming from the woods and it grabs his attention as is evidenced
by the word "hark" (2). The darkness on the inside of the woods gives the music a sense
of mystery since the man cannot be sure where the music is actually coming from or what
is going on inside the woods. The "dusk outside" (3) contrasting with the darkness on the
inside paints an eerie image that aids the mysterious nature of this setting. The rhyme used
in lines 2 and 4 draws attention to the two strongest words in the opening stanza, "hark"
and "dark." The word dark is perhaps the most important because it is used so often lat
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