Review of Range Finding by Robert Frost
Range finding is a poem written by Robert Frost, an American poet famous for expressing his philosophy through his works. Frost’s strong opinion regarding major issues such as war compelled him to write Range finding and is just one of his war poems. He wrote this poem in 1916 when world war one broke out and used this poem to address the themes of war and nature. Range finding paints depict a solder-holding a rifle in readiness of war. This use of descriptive detail and imagery by Frost presents the reader with a first-hand account of the proceeds of the early morning. His style enables the speaker to paint a picture of the destruction caused by the firing of one bullet.
Today, Range finding is a technique that is still relevant in the military where efforts are made to fire sophisticated weapons accurately over long distances. These efforts are a matter of trial and errors and in most cases several unintended areas are hit by the test shots. It is expected that with the appropriate adjustments and time, accurate shots will become easier to take and hit the intended target more. Frost uses his writing to demonstrate to his audience that war is imperfect and involves many mistakes. These mistakes have dire consequences and cause many interruptions in nature.
Range finding is considered as a classic poem consisting of two stanzas made up of eight and six lines respectively. Abba is the rhyme scheme for the opening stanza of Insert Surname 2the poem, the octave. The second stanza, the sestet, follows a less conventional form of ccdeed. Another aspect that is noteworthy is the opening sentence of the poem which is made up of three lines, followed by two one-line sentences and ending with a three-line sentence.
With this style of writing Frost shows noted balance in the manner in which the beginning of the poem is reflected with its ending. Similar to other Frost’s work, Range finding is a simple poem to read and maintains a simple diction and no excessive punctuation. When it comes to time and space, the poem covers a snapshot of a “bare upland pasture” in only a short time, with the second stanza doubling back on the events that were happening with the cobweb in the opening line. The rhyming words have euphony, with one instance of perfect rhymes comprised in all stanzas: “nest” / “rest” and “spread” / “thread”.
At the first glimpse of the poem, one might derive the idea that the poem is about anyone who uses a gun has to hit nothing else other than the target that they are aiming for. Nevertheless, the theme of the poem is much deeper than just the simple presumption of what it is about. An evaluation of the poem reveals that several people fall victims of the shot that was fired yet they were not the intended target. While a reader only knows that there was a shot fired from a gun: the action is known as “The battle” that has “rent a cobweb diamond-strung”. The meaning derived from this first line is that something seems to be very strong illustrated by the single shot fired that easily tears the deadly trap set by a spider. Although the shot may have been a “zeroing in” the weapon or a practice shot that was fired unintentionally enough, the destruction that it causes to the plants and animals in the path of that bullet is extremely harmful to them. Line four talks about the stricken flower’s death, which never recovers after it is doubled over following the strike. Thankfully, this delicate innocent fallen comrade is the only victim in the sonnet.
Several other casualties of the innocent gunshot have no permanent damage and are merely disturbed. The stricken flower was growing next to a ground’s bird’s nest that had baby chicks. The mother bird ignores all the disruption despite being in the middle of the crossfire of a dangerous bullet and continues to care for her chicks. Line six mentions the butterfly that had intended to rest on the stricken flower just a few moments before it was slain by a gunshot. Nonetheless, its plans were interrupted by the bullet. In all these, she also chose to ignore the disruption that had caused the death of the flower and went on to rest on the stalk of the remaining parts of the flower after the incident is over.
The second stanza of the poem emphasizes on the spider and its web. The spider had spent a lot of time the night before turning threads into cables to come up with the perfect trap to trap its prey: which was what he relied on to feed his family. However, a single passing bullet disrupts his work. The bullet caused so much impact causing the dew he had collected to fall onto the ground rendering his work to be of no benefit. To his oblivion of the event that had just occurred the spider quickly went to catch what he thought was prey trapped in the web. Instead, he found damage that would take cost him a lot of time and effort to fix. He would retreat “sullenly” rather than having a quick breakfast. The spider was like an old man that just saw his window broken by the neighborhood kids with an innocent game of street baseball. In this instance, the detail description of the spider personifies the animal, and the reader can paint a picture of how the spider looked as he mumbles under his breath “those damn kids!”
Robert Frost did not compose this sonnet to describe the person firing the shot or to elaborate on the “single human breast” who was the target of the bullet. Instead, he centered his poem on the flower, the bird, the butterfly, and the spider whose livers were significantly impacted by the unintended gunshot. Without a doubt, the theme of the poem involves the impact or the interruption that I caused by war – nature, bird, and even the tiniest animals. Although many people think that war only includes the ones in the battlefields, every aspect of nature including everything in it is interrupted by war.
