In What Ways Is Waste Explored in the Poem the Wood Pile by Robert Frost

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Daisy Bradford In what ways is ‘waste’ explored in The Wood Pile? The poem the wood pile focuses on the subject of man versus nature, a common theme in Frost’s poems that he conveys in The Wood Pile using a disorganised structure, personification of wildlife and a lack of rhythm and rhyme to write the poem and he uses these devices to create a feeling of waste and to represent the wasteful actions of humanity and how they affect the natural world. The wood pile is a poem that can be interpreted in many ways, one of these is the interpretation that the wood pile as a subject is a metaphor for the way humans use up and waste natures resources. Frost uses a lack of rhythm and rhyme to make the poem feel purposeless and a waste of words, using no regular beat and the use of long verses and randomly placed punctuation makes the poem appear never ending and with no structure, mimicking the continuous destruction of the forest aforementioned in the poem. However the use of such random structure can connect to the context and the actions being described; the characters foot falls through the ice “ the hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. …” the full stop in the middle of the verse creates the feeling of the suddenness of the ice breaking. Moreover the fact that the protagonist fell through the ice implies he doesn’t belong in the forest. Furthermore the woods appears to be a strange midway place between two places, and the character doesn’t know where he is or where he’s going, therefore he is wasting his time in a forest corrupted by the waste of humanity. The only other time Frost uses a full stop mid verse is further on in the poem “still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. …” this verse has significance because the stake and prop supporting the wood pile with the tree on the other side is a direct

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