The Vantage Point - A poem by Robert Frost

Poet: Robert Frost
Poem: 17. The Vantage Point
Volume: A Boy's Will
Year: Published/Written in 1913
Poem of the Day: Mar 9 2005

Comment 2 of 2, added on March 9th, 2005 at 4:10 AM.

"To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn."

I love that simile

This reminds me strongly of "Ave Maria" another beauty frost

AnGuRuSO from China

Comment 1 of 2, added on August 24th, 2004 at 8:56 PM.

This is one of Frost's roughly two dozen sonnets. As in virtually every one of them, he plays with the formal aspects of the sonnet. (For the best example of this see "The Silken Tent." There the sonnet is both Italian and English, just as the tent and the woman are both bound and free.)
Here, he uses the typical English rhyme (three quatrains of ABBA and a closing rhymed couplet). But, he divides the poem at the 8th line's end to look like an Italian sonnet and even indents the final six lines to look Italian. He also makes the turn obvious, even using the phrase "turn on my arm," to show how his change of his body from facing down the hill to up the hill changes his perspective.
I really enjoy the irony of the premise of the whole poem being his seeking mankind by observing them from afar. When he re-turns to nature (he'd was tired of trees in line one) in the final six lines, his relationship and proximity to nature is much closer and involved.

John Ladd

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