Here’s a detailed analysis of Robert Frost’s poem ‘An Unstamped Letter In Our Rural Letterbox’; it’s tailored towards students taking the CIE / Cambridge A-Level syllabus but will be useful for anyone who’s working on understanding the poem at any level.
Great for revision, missed le...
An Unstamped Letter In Our Rural Letterbox
Robert Frost
Last night your watchdog barked all night,
So once you rose and lit the light.
It wasn’t someone at your locks.
No, in your rural letter box
I leave this note without a stamp
To tell you it was just a tramp
Who used your pasture for a camp.
There, pointed like the pip of spades,
The young spruce made a suite of glades
So regular that in the dark
The place was like a city park.
There I elected to demur
Beneath a low-slung juniper
That like a blanket on my chin
Kept some dew out and some heat in,
Yet left me freely face to face
All night with universal space.
It may have been at two o’clock
That under me a point of rock
Developed in the grass and fern,
And as I woke afraid to turn
Or so much as uncross my feet,
Lest having wasted precious heat
I never should again be warmed,
The largest firedrop ever formed
From two stars’ having coalesced
Went streaking molten down the west.
And then your tramp astrologer
From seeing this undoubted stir
In Heaven’s firm-set firmament,
Himself had the equivalent,
Only within. Inside the brain
Two memories that long had lain
Now quivered toward each other, lipped
Together, and together slipped,
, And for a moment all was plain
That men have thought about in vain.
Please, my involuntary host,
Forgive me if I seem to boast.
‘Tis possible you may have seen
Albeit through a rusty screen,
The same sign Heaven showed your guest.
Each knows his own discernment best
You have had your advantages.
Things must have happened to you, yes,
And have occurred to you no doubt,
If not indeed from sleeping out,
Then from the work you went about
In farming well—or pretty well.
And it is partly to compel
Myself, in forma pauperis,
To say as much as I wrote you this.
VOCABULARY
Watchdog - a guard dog
Tramp - a homeless person who travels around
Pasture - field
Pip of spades - ‘pips’ are the symbols on playing cards that tell us the number of the
card. The ‘pip of spades’ means the ‘spade’ symbol - in the poem, the spruce trees
look like them
Spruce - pine trees, similar in appearance to Christmas trees
Suite - a room or group of rooms, often related to hotels ‘suit’ of cards
Glades - open clearings in a wood or forest
Elected - chose to do something
Demur - disagree or show reluctance to do something
Juniper - a type of fir tree with fragrant leaves and edible berries
Universal space - the universe, as seen in the night sky (a pun, as ‘universal’ also
means ‘infinite)
Firedrop - this is a word that Frost has invented to use just here, it refers to a meteor
that burns as it falls across the sky - we see meteors by the light
Streaking - streaming, moving quickly across something or creating a line
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