“He thought he kept the universe alone,” too most people the thoughts of being alone are very frightening. It is human nature to search for companionship. In the poem “The Most of It,” Robert Frost uses a wealth of strong imagery to tell a story of a person who has lost his loved one to death and has to suffer the feeling of loneliness and emptiness created by it. Frost uses the setting of a lake surrounded by a forest to convey a feeling of peace and of being alone to the reader.
A man is sitting on the edge of the lake, crying out for someone, his echo being his only company. After time, a buck swam across the lake and appeared on the shore and abruptly runs into the brush, away from sight. Although the man only caught a glimpse of the deer for a short moment, it was long enough for him to feel that he was no longer alone, but had something there, even though it was not tangible. The clues given to the reader that someone has passed on are the words “wake” and three lines down, the word “morning.
A wake can be many things; one is that it is a vigil that is held in honor of a person who has recently died. “Morning” can be taken as “mourning” and be seen as Frost grieving for a loved one. One also develops the impression that Frost is mourning a great loss, such as a spouse or soul mate, because of the line, “He would cry out on life, that what it wants/ Is not its own love back in copy speech/ But counter-love. ” That quote shows the reader that the man was alone, so alone, that he “cried out on life” asking for it to give his lost love back.
He doesnt want to love someone who agrees with him wholly, and had no ideas of their own, but someone who is articulate, and has opinions of their own. He wants someone he could talk to and love for who they are, not who they try to be. He had this in his lost love, and now he has no one to share his feelings and emotions with. He was truly alone in the world. “Nothing came of what he cried,” until one day when an amazing thing happened, something appeared that made him no longer feel so alone. “Instead of proving human when it neared/ As a great buck it powerfully appeared.
This “buck” symbolizes his lost love, instead of coming back to him in her tangible form; he realized that she was all around him, no matter where he was. She was always in his memories, in his heart. He no longer felt alone, but at peace knowing she was in a better place, but still with him. Although the poem has rhyme scheme (a,b,a,b,c,d,c,d,e,f,e,f,g,h,g,h,I,j,I,j) it feels more like Frost is writing a first draft of a story. The last line, “And forced the underbrushand that was all. ” Seems a rather abrupt ending.
The buck came and went, and that was all. It seems as though Frost wanted to say more, but wasnt able to. It also seems a sad ending, in that the “buck” came into his life and left just as quickly, leaving only a memory. Frost does not give a tangible identity to what he was looking for. He uses the term “it” to describe this thing. He does not know exactly what he wants, so giving it the broad term of “it,” allows for “it” to be anything. Frost is searching for something to fulfill his empty heart, and he finds that in the “buck. ”
In the beginning of the poem Frost is crying out, trying to find something to fulfill his loneliness. By the end, he has found something to lessen the pain of his loss, but it is fleeting. Although, it was able to ring Frost to the realization that he was not alone, but what he was looking for is always around him. Frost found what he was looking for, but not until he came to terms with his loss. He will never be alone again, and he never was in the first place, for he had the memories, of his wife. Those memories will always remain the same and will always keep her in his life.