Robert Frost

‘THE MOST OF IT’

• It is a narrative poem, the incident related in the past tense, “thought”,
“cried”, “neared” and “appeared”.

• A man stood alone on the empty shore of a lake, aware of his solitude and
loneliness, “he thought he kept the universe alone”.

• Sometimes, he would call out in his loneliness but all he heard was the
echo of his own voice.

• This “mocking echo” serves only to double the intensity of his loneliness.

• The present tense is used to emphasise the man’s needs: he “wants”

(line 6) not “copy speech” but “an original response”.

• The landscape seems solitary and quite wild, lacking any human reference,
with its “tree-hidden cliff across the lake” and its “boulder-broken beach”.

• The plosive alliteration of “boulder-broken beach” emphasises the

harshness of this environment.

• The only response is some kind of “embodiment” that he could hear as it

“crashed” at the ankles (“talus”) of the cliff opposite.

• This creature swam across the lake and when it emerged, was “a great
buck”.

• It came out of the lake sodden and “stumbled through the rocks” as it came
to shore.

• In the simile “pouring like a waterfall”, a picture is created of the water

dripping and cascading from the buck as it “landed”.

• Sound imagery – “the voice”, “the mocking echo”, the “cry”, the way the
creature “crashed” and “splashed”.

• Sight imagery – the “tree-hidden cliff across the lake”, the scale of this cliff
made clear by the reference to its “talus”, “the boulder-broken beach”, how
the “great buck … powerfully appeared”, “the crumpled water” and the
“forced … underbrush” under its “horny tread”.

• Frost’s use of the third person “he” distances him from being closely
identified with the poem’s narrator (unlike when he uses the first person
and seems to indicate that the poem might be about himself).

• This generalised, anonymous use of the third person suggests that the man
in the poem is perhaps all human beings, rather than one specific one.

• The poem, then, could be interpreted as being about man’s place in the
world and his relationship with his environment, or with nature.

‘The Most of It’ copyright © Robert Frost

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 Robert Frost

• When the man calls out in his loneliness, he perhaps needs to know if
there is any spiritual intelligence listening to him.

• Human beings have spiritual yearnings: Frost asks if there is any higher
intelligence in the natural world to hear or support us.

• Nature’s response is ambiguous.

• The buck appears and swims to him “and that was all”.

• Is the buck’s appearance a response from somewhere beyond human

existence: does it mean anything?

• Is it symbolic or just something that happened?

• The last line “and that was all” suggests that it had no real significance
and, if so, the poem is a dark and gloomy statement about mankind being
alone in this existence.

• But the title “The Most of It” intimates something more optimistic.

• This phrase does not re-appear in the poem and so the title makes its own
particular contribution to the poem’s message.

• As a colloquial expression, it indicates a philosophy of deriving whatever

pleasure or advantage is possible, especially in unpromising
circumstances.

• If the buck’s appearance is the reply to the man’s yearning, perhaps it is a

hopeful message.

• Perhaps its interpretation is in the eye of the beholder: for those who want
it to be a symbol, then it is a symbol and for those who do not want that,
then it is not!

• There are concise rhyming quatrains of iambic pentameter.

• From lines 9 to 20 is all one very long sentence, the sequence of clauses
tumbling one after the other as he describes the buck’s appearance.

• Frost tantalises the reader with this syntax, beginning by saying that
“nothing” (line 9) came of the man’s call except an “embodiment” (line 10)
which is not identified for another six lines (line 16).

• The last three lines begin with an identical grammatical pattern, “And
landed …” , “And stumbled …” , “And forced …” as Frost accumulates
detail, allowing the reader to envisage it.

• The last four words “and that was all” are ambiguous and enigmatic: is it
bathos, an anticlimax after the build-up of the suspense?

• Or is it a riddle, an open ending for the reader to solve?

‘The Most of It’ copyright © Robert Frost
© 2006 www.teachit.co.uk 4927.doc Page 2 of 2