Robert Frost's “Home Burial” is a narrative poem about love, grief, desire. The story revolves around a husband and wife who, having lost their first born, are at an opposition as to how to deal with the death. Amy desires to leave the house, because of her husband's detachment or her baby's death, while the husband wills for her to stay and talk. The argument between the characters and their conflicting desires drives the story. However, Frost has incorporated into the scene a more important element than either the characters or the dialogue.
The entire scene takes place on a staircase, a telling diagonal, on which the characters move about like chess pieces. In a game of chess, the movements of the pieces are almost more revealing of the players' styles than the base facts of who won, who lost. By studying just the movements of the pieces, one can discern and measure a player's aggression, thoughtfulness, experience, and strategy. Frost transforms the argument between the spouses into a kind of chess game, revealing the nature of the conflict and the characters more through action and setting than through dialogue.
More so than some of Frost's other dialogue driven poems, such as “Death of the Hired Man,” the setting of “Home Burial” resembles that of a play. This semblance is because the entire scene is confined to the same setting, a staircase with a door at the bottom and a window at the top, throughout the entire poem. The setting is actively involved in the poem from the first stanza, “He saw her from the bottom of the stairs” (55), to the last, “She was opening the door wider” (58). The window at the top of the stairs looks out onto a plot in the backyard where the husband's relatives and the baby are buried. The husband describes the graveyard as “so small the window frames the whole of it” (56). The graveyard is represented solely within the context of the window, inside the window frame; and the window comes to embody the baby's death. The relatives are buried under “three stones of slate and one of marble” (56) while the baby is buried much more ominously under a mound, a fearful excrescence rather than a memorial.
The poem begins with the husband at the bottom of the stairs, him watching his wife, and Amy at the top of the stairs, looking through the window. The placement of both these characters visually presents the conflict immediately to the reader. Both characters share the same problem, represented by the staircase: the grieving of the death and the subsequent change in their relationship. Therefore, both characters start standing on the staircase. However, the couple is standing at opposite ends of this staircase, representing not only their opposing desires and ways of dealing with the problem, but also the path that they must travel to reach the other person.
The husband has literally an upward battle to be in his wife's position; he must climb the staircase to reach the window overlooking the graveyard. Figuratively, this means that he must raise his regard of the baby's death- a higher importance, a stronger sense of grief, and more sensitive- to be close to his wife. At the poem's start, the husband holds the death at a lower importance (he stands at the bottom of the staircase) and is very distanced from the death (he stands the farthest away possible from the mound). Frost uses the husband's position to explain his attitude toward the baby's death without the husband having to speak or even act.
The wife, however, starts at the top of the stairs, closest to the window as possible. Her stationary position tells the reader that she holds the baby's death in great importance and is very attached to it. More interestingly, in order to traverse the staircase, which represents the conflict between the characters, she must travel downward. This slant reflects her outlook of the relationship after the child's death. Looking at the staircase as a line graph, quality of the marriage over time, we see that after the child's death the relationship will fall steadily until it reaches the end of the relationship, represented by the door, the house's exit. This progression reveals why the wife is attached and sympathizes with the baby; for her, the baby's death symbolizes the death of the relationship, for it acts as a cataclysm for the ultimate end of the marriage. The staircase represents, for her, the deterioration of her marriage and the death of her home. Frost uses the character's position in relation to the staircase to reveal her conflict in the poem as well as why she relates significantly to the dead child.
