Liaisons between, say, a twenty year old “man” and a teen-aged “girl” were not considered grounds for statutory rape. However, if one is going to argue that the poem is strictly autobiographical (which I wouldn’t), then Elinor and Robert would have been the same age.Īnother cautionary thought would be this: be careful not to anachronistically appraise their relationship (such as it was or wasn’t). That doesn’t mean he was portraying himself and Elinor (his wife), only that the poem might have been inspired by something, at some time, in their relationship. Frost’s own statement concerning the poem suggests an autobiographical element.So, my reading of their ages is that she’s probably younger than him in age, or at least younger than him in maturity and experience-or both. Both are suggested by the line: “A girl could only see/ That a flower had marred a man…” In other words, a woman might have understood, might have seen otherwise, but a girl could only see “a marred man”. He wants to see her that way, he “ eyed” her that way, but as the poem later suggests: she’s either not old enough to be eyed that way or she herself, if old enough, is too naive or immature. “ For a woman” suggests that maybe she really wasn’t.

Not too young for a boy or man’s (if we consider an eighteen or nineteen year old a man let’s say) amorous and physical affections.įrost writes that “He eyed her for a while / For a woman”, but there’s hedging in that statement. So I’m going to refer to her as a girl, probably in her mid teens. Usually when we refer to a teen-aged girl we refer to her as just that-a teen-aged girl-and not a teen-aged woman. I read that as meaning that she’s rightly called a girl. Frost, though, makes a point of at least the girl’s youth, referring to her as “one so young”. Judith Oster, in her essay Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor, chooses to read the poem as an inexperienced girl and boy (seemingly ignoring the narrator’s own description of the “boy” as a “marred man”). On the subject of their age, I notice while reading what others have written, that the protagonists are frequently referred to as a man and a woman. On the other, Frost goes on to warn us that this is how the girl, or woman, sees him (and perhaps not how we should see him): “…what the flower began/ Her own too meager heart/ Had terribly completed. On the one hand, the boy, or man, is transformed into a beast with a “ragged muzzle”, “a hand hung like a paw”, and “a coward save at night”.

This poem puzzles me in a number of ways, and that’s probably because, as far as the poem goes, the reader isn’t quite sure what to make of either protagonist.

Red frost poems