A Boundless Moment: Analysis

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on 26th March 1874. His family was from New England. Frost joined Dartmouth College in 1892, and his first poem, ‘The Butterfly,’ was published in New York Independent in 1894. He was honored with the Pulitzer Prize and was invited to recite his poem ‘The Gift Outright’ at the inauguration of President Kennedy. Frost died in the year 1963. Before we proceed with the summary and analysis of a boundless moment, we like to remind our readers that Frost is not a Nature poet. He uses nature as a background to contemplate humanity and has effectively done this in all his poems.

A Boundless Moment: Analysis

“He halted in the wind, and — what was that
Far in the maples, pale, but not a ghost?
He stood there bringing March against his thought,
And yet too ready to believe the most.

Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom,” I said;
And truly it was fair enough for flowers
had we but in us to assume in march
Such white luxuriance of May for ours.

We stood a moment so in a strange world,
Myself as one his own pretense deceives;
And then I said the truth (and we moved on).
A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.“

Robert Frost, the great American poet, in his poem a boundless moment, depicts the law of attachment. The poem a boundless moment is sensitively portraying the law of nature, its slow and gradual change, and how origin leads to attachment and then further detachment.

The poet touches the wind, stops it, and questions himself what the wind is carrying? He furthers and finds out that the wind is carrying with it decayed, rotten maple leaves. They are dead, but they do not ghost, and they will relive in the form of Spring. Then he further waits for the beautiful Spring, the Spring, the March is the time of hope ‘he stood there bringing March against his thought.’ It’s a time for a new era, a new period to begin.

He is intoxicated with the beauty of nature and compares the spring bloom flowers to paradise. The flowers are delighted to get new skin. They are finding their new petals so beautiful, as if a soul has found a new body. They are exuberant and delighted. The poet is further happy in the wait of May as the journey which begins in March would get accomplished in May with a sparking radiant white luxurious flower.

We as human beings slog on momentary moods of life, living in our own preconceived world where we accept changes readily and accept change as a law of nature, there where somewhere is a small, fragile pale branch of the tree still attached to its previous year’s leaf not ready to leave its near one.

The poet is trying to say that in this fast-moving world, when a man has become a robot and is trying to match the speed of the fast-moving world, there are still some people who are attached to their small pleasures and little happiness and are still trying to hold those beautiful, boundless moments together.

The poem is written in blank verse, and there’s a metaphysical element present in the poem. The impulse and the direction are lyrical. There is an unplumbed depth and an intensity of feeling in his lyrics.  The poem is fresh, and Frost is articulate in his approach. He regards the natural world as impersonal and unfeeling. The poem of Frost gives significance to seemingly insignificant things and places; in this poem, he has given significance to a wintry tree still holding last year’s leaves: a young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.” There is symbolism present in the poem where the wintry tree interprets human wishes and desires.

The tree branch symbolizes the weakness of a man who is not willing to detach from his old things. The poem besieges the philosophical approach of life that in a fast-moving pace of life, it’s the man’s unison with self that contemplates him to resist the temptations of life and leaves him aside with those precious boundless moments.

The poem is Frost’s endeavor to show human insight and complex nature where beauty and change fascinate him but still, somewhere in his heart, he lives his lone solitary precious moments, which are only his.