"Home Burial" by Robert Frost is a tragic poem about a young life cut short and the collapse of a marriage and family . The poem is considered greatly inspired and "spurred by the Frosts' loss of their first child to cholera at age 3" (Romano 2). The complex relationship between husband and wife after the death of their child is explored in detail and presented truthfully. Among many others, the range of emotions exhibited include grief, isolation, acceptance and rejection. The differences in the characters' emotions and reactions are obvious. The husband and wife in Robert Frost's "Home Burial" react to the death of their son in stereotypical ways and interact with each other with difficulty and resistance. While the wife constantly cries over the death of her son, the husband is more in control of the situation. and is obviously the stronger of the two. From the outset, the husband assumes the stereotypical masculine role in this type of event. He buries the son, hides his emotions and offers to be there to support his wife. Unlike his distraught wife's methods, "his strategy for coping with death and bereavement is to appeal to community norms and broader natural continuities, and thus to avoid taking the loss too personally" (Norwood 59). . By behaving this way, he is able to accept the situation and start moving forward in life. The husband by no means ignores the death of his son, but on the contrary creates a continuous bond with him. In order to unify, his son and their ancestors; “It presents the family cemetery in comforting language” (Norwood 60). He considers those who died to be his people, and now his son is part of that group. This approach to looking at the dead shows that the husband has a great... middle of paper ... ll, it solidifies the fact that he needs her and cannot live without her. Robert Frost is able to capture the intensity and sadness that accompanies this type of event with great attention to detail and word choice. He is able to tell the story in a way that the reader is immediately able to understand, but he also makes the reader think about what is happening. It makes the reader wonder why the characters act the way they do. It forces the reader to question the complex nature of grief and sadness that ultimately leads to feelings of abandonment. The characters of the mother and father in this poem react to the death of their son in their own ways, and these ways are not the same. Works Cited: Frost, Robert. “Home burial. » Poetry and prose by Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Latham and Lawrence Thompson. New York: Holt. 1972.