Life and aging: Robert Frosts The Span of a Life - Essay Example

Life and aging: Robert Frost’s The Span of a Life This essay will compare the lives of a dog and a man as shown in this short poem. In order to do this I will examine three elements. These elements are: memory, generation of life, life cycle of birth and death. The first element is memory. The poem is developed through an economy of words, starting with one line and ending abruptly with the next. The message, however, can be examined for a great deal of elemental variations on themes on the issue of the memory. The first line shows the dog turning back, his bark coming from a stationary place, but looking back as if he is looking behind him to his past (Frost 103). In this poem the space from the pup to the bark is filled with the memories that make up the span of a life. The second element is the generation of life. The concept of the finite space of time in which a life is lived can be understood through the concept of a generation of life. It is also hinted at as the narrator uses the word pup, a reference that has a sentimental tone and can be interpreted to provide an intimacy with the dog. The dog as a symbol more than likely refers to the narrator, the sentiment that he confers on the dog actually coming from the memories that he has of his own life. Bloom discusses the concept of nostalgia as it is referenced in a human and a non-human figurative space. The human sentiment of a life that has been lived, a generation, is conveyed through the use of the non-human figure and the concept of memory. Bloom states that he must “liken it to a human sigh”, the non-human configuration of nostalgia in this case wrapped in his backwards bark (Bloom 95). The poem has a finite space in which it communicates its message. According to Schleuter, in reading a piece of writing it is important to understand the temporal placement of the end of the work (Schleuter 86). This poem continues past its ending, a story unfolding through the imagination of the reader, past and present coming together as a story of the life of the dog, parallels the life of the person who is reading the work. Through the turn of the head to the back, the dog has indicated a space between his present, and the past that is alluded to by the narrator, suggesting the defined space of the time of his generation. The space in between is the span of life, a much longer story that slides between the first line and the last. The third element is the life cycle of birth and death. The two references to age, both the concept of the old dog in contrast with the concept of the pup, provide a framework for a discourse on aging, thus discussing the cycle of birth and then death that each living creature must pass through in his or her journey. As the narrator states that he remembers when the dog was a pup, he provides a clue to age in reference to both the dog and to himself. Age is a familiar topic for Frost, his work Age providing a discussion on the way in which the hope of age and the reality of age can be two different things, the contents of a life not reflecting the hopes of youth (Faggen 44). One can almost take the age poem and place it in the space in between the past and the present The comparison that Frost makes between the narrator and the dog can be examined through the three elements of memory, generation of life, and the life cycle of birth and death. The concepts are captured within the space of the two line poem, the economy in words reflecting a full story in between the lines. The span of the life of both the man and the dog reflect a passage of time that contain wistful memories in its spaces. Works Cited Barnett, Sylvan, William E. Cain and William Burton. Literature for Composition. New York: Pearson, 2008. P. 103. Bloom, Harold. Robert Frost. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2003. P. 95. Faggen, Robert. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. P. 44. Schlueter, June. Dramatic Closure: Reading the End. Madison [N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. P. 86. Read More