The Impulse Poem Analysis

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“The Impulse” is the last short poem and considered the climax in the series of poems called “The Hill Wife”. “The Hill Wife” written by Robert Frost depicts a story of a childless married women’s departure from her inattentive husband. Specifically, in “The Impulse”, Frost delineates the deterioration of a married relationship through structuring the stanzas to mimic the poem’s abrupt nature, illustrating the theme of loneliness through the two perspectives between the couple, and depicting their relationship with nature imagery.
“The Impulse” is written in seven quatrains and has a ABCB rhyme scheme to invoke a pulse-like nature to the rhythm of the poem. Throughout, the poem has a consistent eight, three, eight, three syllable pattern except …show more content…

The husband’s job is an outdoors job woodworking and cutting down trees which can later be metaphorically applied to the poem. The breaking of the bough during the “impulse” is the breaking of a tree- parallel to what the husband’s job does. The broken branch comes from a “black alder” (14), which is a tree that sheds male catkins and female cones representing that the tree can have children while the couple cannot. Ironically, the black alder tree’s wood is used to build houses while their marriage (home) is broken. Additionally, the women is connected to the image of a bird when she “rested on a log and tossed the fresh chips, with a song only to herself on her lips” ( 9-12). The connotations of the bird represent her transformation into freedom as she realizes that she must leave. The poem ends with “sudden and swift and light” which is another bird-like image that can be traced back to the earlier image to depict her final carthaic release. Lastly, the wife’s final appearance in the poem depicts her hiding in ferns which can be tied to the larger poem, “The Hill Wife”, to mark the her final transitive to freedom.
Between the pulse like structure and the toggle between two speakers, Robert Frost is able to convey the disparity of a neglected relationship with the poem “The Impulse”. Set in the rural countryside, Frost is able to clearly displays the themes of loneliness, pain, and uselessness through the symbolic nature of the break in rhythm in the poem as well as the connection to his

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