Poetry In Motion
...e man wants to hear. When Frost writes, “For all the voice in answer he could wake,” the narrator uses the word wake as the cause of hearing his own voice, if someone speaks the voice is heard. This man obviously is tired of being alone, as you can see through the word “mocking.” When you hear the word mocking you think of someone making fun of what someone else is saying. The man in the poems own voice is making fun of his situation or predicament as the speaker says, “Is not its own love back in copy speech,/ But counter-love, original response” (7-8). When he cries out he wants some sort of counter voice or someone else to scream back at him. He doesn’t want his “original response” to be a copy of his own voice. People generally like to have other people’s company, because it gives life to different situations. When you are all by yourself, with no end in sight, it can be disheartening because people generally gravitate towards others’ company. The speaker says, And then in the far distant water splashed, But after time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared ….As a buck it powerfully appeared (12-26). This man hears something splash and his first thought is its’ another person. I would think that he has a feeling of hope. He’s waiting, and the longer one waits the more anxious and excited one gets. Then he looks in the direction the noise came from and is like this isn’t a human. Another life, one not human, appears and it is a strong buck. Frost uses the word powerfully to give the idea that this buck symbolizes something. It isn’t just another animal on the island. Frost wants us to see the correlation between the animal and the man. He wants us to look at how differently they are acting in their same environment. And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush-and that was all (18-20). The buck gets out of the water, with water pouring off of him, and goes into the brush. He doesn’t look around for other forms of life. He doesn’t try to relate to anyone or anything. He doesn’t look for more than he has. The buck, it seems, makes the most out of his situation without question. It just goes on about its life because it doesn’t expect more. The human knows t...