The three tragedies of Home Burial "Home Burial" by Robert Frost is a narrative poem about the tragedies of life. The theme of "Home Burial" centers on the death of a child. During the time period in which the poem is set, society dictated that men not show their feelings. Therefore, men dealt with conflicts by working hard and being domineering. "Home Burial" demonstrates how one tragedy can lead to another. The unnamed couple in this poem lost a child to death. The mother suffers openly and one could say that she has never recovered from this loss; Bereaved parents never forget, but most people in this position gradually find a way to deal with their grief and move on with their lives. What the young mother cannot do. The child is buried in the family cemetery, which is visible from an upstairs window of their home. Day after day he goes to the stairwell window that looks out over the nearby family plot. The sight of the rough mound where her son lies buried reopens her grief, but another emotion also emerges: anger and bitterness towards her husband is initially inexplicable. The first hint of the rift between them appears in lines twelve to thirteen, she "refused him any help, with the slightest stiffening of the neck and silence." Their dialogue is cold and antagonistic. "What is...what? /Only what I see. /You don't see it, he challenged. /Tell me what it is."(18-19). The death of the son, which should bind husband and wife more closely in their shared grief, instead separates them (Gerber 128). In the husband's first two lines and the last, his attitude towards his wife is domineering and seems insensitive. First he tells her "he wants to know" what she keeps looking at... in the middle of the paper... in your mind's eye you could see the gravel sliding back into the hole. We could actually visualize the mound getting taller. There were three different tragedies that emerged in this poem. The first thing was the burial of the child; the second was the burial of the marriage and finally the most symbolic and ironic tragedy is the burial of the house. Due to unfortunate circumstances these three things were closely associated with the house burial. All these tragedies occurred following the burial of the child. The couple's marriage could not survive such an emotional loss. Therefore the marriage is buried. When the marriage was buried, the house became the burial place of this family's life. Works Cited: Frost, Robert. 1972. "Home Burial." Poetry and prose by Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Latham and Lawrence Thompson. New York: Holt.