Frost’s conception of life as a conversation that refuses closure informs his dramatic dialogues between men and women. Some of the most convincing and disturbing colloquies in Frost occur between men and women, particularly in “Home Burial, ”In the Home Stretch,” “The Fear,” and “The Death of the Hired Man.“ What it means to be human becomes worked out in the conflict of these conversations. In ”The Death of the Hired Man,“ the nature and stability of “home,” itself a metaphor for order, finds meaning only tentatively in the debate between Mary and her husband, Warren. Frost breaks the blank verse line (unrhymed iambic pentameter) across the initial statements of both, allowing each voice to play in variations before falling back into the regular meter that acts as the life pulse. Frost said there are only two meters in English, “strict iambic” and “loose iambic,” and here he demonstrates the way thought plays within the rhythms of ordinary speech but still follows a very regular and powerful cadence that sometimes resists but ultimately falls into the regularity of iambic pentameter:

“Home,” he mocked gently.

“Yes, what else but home?

It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the train.”

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”

“I should have called it

Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

This dialogue arrives at different and troubling attitudes toward home as Mary and Warren work out their thoughts in reaction to each other’s cues. But the momentary points of agreement can be destroyed if the wills of the players fail to accommodate each other. That failure is implied in the dark pun of the title of “Home Burial,” one of Frost’s greatest poems. The death of a child makes participation in the ordinary rhythms of life nearly impossible and reveals hidden faults in the souls of a husband and wife. Amy and her husband know how to hurt each other, and the questioning of the reality of each other’s grief becomes a pretext for feardriven displays of power and control. Amy accuses her husband of not knowing how to grieve, while also refusing his attempts to understand her grief. In “Home Burial” great demands are placed on both the characters and the reader to interpret the tone in order to understand what is being said. Is the husband really a brute, treading crudely on his wife’s profound grief over the loss of a child? Or does Amy’s silence and anger reflect grief about her marriage and her husband’s control over her? Each finds ways of destroying the barriers the other creates in an ongoing drama of power. Much depends upon how we take the husband’s tone when he says:

The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?