Visual Imagery in Frosts Home Burial Frost, within his poems, seems primarily concerned with the readers ability to comprehend the psychological landscape of the person (or persons) that he is depicting. This aspect of his works, as well as his great love of nature and landscape depiction, both contribute to the environment that he has created within Home Burial. The reader of Home Burial does not achieve a comprehensive view of the psychological landscape of the two characters through first person accounts; however, throughout the dialogue and the interaction of the two characters, the reader may come to infer the major psychological attributes of each and to understand the dynamic within that relationship under the present circumstances. Frost enables the reader to comprehend these phenomena through the use of visual imagery and spatial relation between the two characters. In the first scene, the initial dynamic between the two characters is established, He saw her from the bottom of the stairs(1). So, here, the reader is provided with a very specific spatial relation between the two characters, that of a woman, being viewed by a man from the bottom of a staircase, as the woman was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear(2-3). There is a sudden change of spatial relation when the two meet on the stairs, the man mounting until she cowered under him(11). This abrupt change in the spatial relativity of the two characters mirrors their collective psychological topography. The woman, who is later introduced as Amy and presumably the wife of this man, is superior to her husband in her acute emotional awareness and sensitivity, therefore the perspective achieved in her descending the staircase from her elevated emotional status is appropriate to the psychological realm. However, when this dynamic is dissolved within their relationship, all the reader is left to see is her cowering under him, indicating...
