Two Look At Two By Robert Frost; The Summary

Two Look At Two by Robert Frost is a love-family-relationship poem. The poem begins with first three lines suggesting that if the couples in question, still cherished love, sacrifices and the heart to forget spouse wrong actions, they might have been able to press a little further in their matrimonial journey:
"Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up"(line 1-3)

“They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding.”

The quoted lines above suggest that at a point in most love
relationship, couples take a break when faced with a very difficult situation even thinking of letting go of such relationship but few other lines in the poem explain that the journey of a love
relationship is like treading a very dark path at night; where the journey has been very rough and
going back is very dangerous alone.

Later in the poem, the human couples were faced with two animals (maybe couples_ not so sure of it). The animals were met on the mountainous hill the human couples were travelling. The animals seemed more comfortable on mountain than the human. The poet created the scenario to serve as a motivation to human couples in a
love-family-relationship.

As said before, the poem is about love but considering the use of nature in the poem; it can also be called a poem of nature like many other poem of Robert Frost (Birches, The Road Not Taken, etc). Apart from the pair of lovers all other references concern nature_ the woods with its animals, its trees and stones. These provide the setting or the engagement of the lovers with the animal world represented by the doe and the buck.

In the poem, nature is represented as a great reconciler. By bringing down the artificial wall, it allows the lovers to confront their animal counterparts and learn from them the lesson of tolerance. Nature is also presented as a soother of passions. The lovers find the woods beginning in their romantic adventure. Finally, nature is presented as opposed to any form of restriction which impairs understanding. The poem demonstrates that man-made restrictions cannot endure where nature intervenes. Thus the lovers discover their true selves in the woods where the doe and the duck gave them the opportunity for self-assessment.

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Samuel C. Enunwa aka samueldpoetry
(the Leo with wings flying)