The Depths of Hurt in "Home Burial"

"Home Burial" is a long narrative poem told in Robert Frost's conversational, very free blank verse. This means that the general structure of the lines is unrhymed iambic pentameter -- the same meter that much of Shakespeare's work is written in -- which classically consists of five pairs of alternately stressed syllables, with the stress on the second syllable of each pair; a pure example would be the second line of this poem, "BeFORE/ she SAW/ him, SHE/ was STAR/ing DOWN". …