This is an explication that I did for my AP World Literature Class. I had trouble finding any real explication of this poem online, so I decided to put this up. Feel free to use this explication for a research source,or if you want to you could just copy and paste the whole thing and use that(it comes out to a little over six pages using 12, Times New Roman). Hope this helps, please leave comments if you think I left something important out or if you have any questions that I left unanswered.
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Upon first reading the poem, you might first notice would be the rhyme scheme of the poem. “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight” has an AABB rhyme pattern with the rhyme starting anew each four line stanza. The meter is equally simple, iambic tetrameter, and considering what this poem is talking you can see Frost is using irony. Frost is using the simplest of meter and rhyme to talk about a question that has confounded some of the greatest minds that ever were, the question of why we are here and how we got here. In reference to the imagery used in the poem, you would very likely notice the biblical imagery of the burning bush and God speaking “to people by name.” If you were especially observant, you might notice on your first read through that this poem also has some evolutionary or Darwinian language used in it. While talking about both of these things Frost takes a very sarcastic approach to both religion and science trying to show how our world was created and why we are here. As I have mentioned before this was Frost’s feeling and this lent itself to how Frost was willing to listen to any position if someone had a mind to discuss with him.
This poem seems pretty typical with Frost’s other works. It deals with the topics that Frost spent most of his life thinking about, religion and evolution. This poem expresses Frost’s dissatisfaction with the attempts of religion and science to explain how we came about. Neither could satisfy him by themselves, but together he could accept a union of the two ideas. Other poems, such as “Desert Places”, express Frost’s fear of the universe because of how vast and seemingly uncaring it is (Sloan). A lot of this comes out in Frost’s writing because of the angst that his beliefs caused him. He was consumed with this terror of the cosmos and what God could do to us if he was so inclined.
Now let’s get down to the actual explication of “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight” starting with a look at the title. With all the Darwinian and biblical language and symbolism that this poem contains, it is not surprising that the title of this poem contains references to both Darwinian and Biblical concepts.
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