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D’Elia Chandler
Humanity is Not Deserved
Robert Frost believed that speaking well was crucial in conversation. Critic Walter Jost
comments that Frost’s definition of “speaking well” challenges the norm of “clear
communication” because Frost believed one must ultimately speak in undertones rather than
obviously stating an idea (Jost 417). In the poem, “The Death of the Hired Man”, Mary speaks so
that Warren can eventually come to understand her meanings. She does so eloquently and
poetically. Her words honor the subject: Silas. The poem is, on one level, about Mary urging her
husband Warren to take in the dying Silas, a former farm hand. The act of taking Silas in has two
meanings: one of literally taking him into their home; the other of understanding him, and what
he wants to do with his final hours on earth. Mary believes that Silas has come “home” to die.
However, the poem goes much deeper than that. Frost uses conversation and dialogue in the
hermeneutic sense, two people coming to understand a shared subject matter, to develop Mary’s
true meaning of the word “home” and her desire for her husband to show compassion towards
Silas. Throughout the course of the poem, Mary patiently utilizes a form of language in the
hermeneutic sense to remind her husband what they, as a couple, stand for.
On the surface, the poem is about a farm wife, Mary, who pleads with her husband,
Warren, to take back a former farmhand who has routinely been a disappointment. The
farmhand, Silas, is not the same person: “and he’s changed” (160) Mary tells Warren. Silas is
very ill, and Mary, using matter-of-fact language, is convinced that he has returned to the farm to
die. Warren has not seen Silas in his ill state and, still angry over the contract that Silas broke
with him in the past, does not want to have Silas on his property. Mary’s compassionate urging
eventually convinces Warren, but when he goes to get Silas, he is already dead.
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The poem develops over the course of four different sections. Section one focuses on the
setting of the poem and the introduction of the major characters. Section two focuses on
Warren’s argument on why not to bring Silas back and develops the character of Silas. Section
three embodies the climax of the poem and the discussion of what a home means to the couple.
Section four focuses on Warren’s change of heart and eventually the finding that Silas has passed
away.
In the first section, Mary is described as waiting for her husband, Warren, to come home
from the market. She is “musing” (158) over what to say to her husband, knowing that the news
she has for him will cause turmoil. Mary tells Warren that Silas has returned, but urges him to
“be kind” (158). This first section reveals a lot about the couple. Mary is seen as being very
practical by the way she “drew him down” (159) (Warren) to tell him about Silas. In many of
Frost’s poems, he parallels a couple, meaning he shows how they embody the same values and
are virtually the same being, and shows how they are intuitive to one another’s thoughts and
feelings. This is ultimately what the poem is about and Frost highlights this by having the first
letters of Mary’s and Warren’s names as inversions of each other. Mary also has Warren “sit
beside her on the wooden steps” (159) symbolizing that they hold the same values and are on the
same page.
In the next section, Warren battles his past feelings for Silas. Mary patiently must draw
out of her husband the compassion that she knows he has inside of him. She implores him to “be
kind” (158), to which Warren defensively states, “When was I ever anything but kind to him?”
(159) He proceeds to reminisce on how Silas left the farm because Warren could not pay him a
fixed wage. Warren then poses the rhetorical question, “What good is he?” (159) Warren has two
levels of meaning in the question. The first level is the communal level – if a worker is no good,
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get rid of him. The second level is his own view – Silas had left the farm when Warren needed
him, therefore Silas does not deserve his compassion now. The name, Warren, is very
significant. Warren is dealing with two differing ideas of self-worth in the poem – the societal
implication as well as the compassionate, humane one. Warren, meaning a mazelike place where
one can become lost, signifies that the character is lost in his own idea of what worth means. He
needs a guiding light – Mary – to bring him back to reality and back to what it truly means to be
human and have self-worth.
As section two progresses, Silas is further humanized as Mary compassionately tells
Warren of Silas’s state. She describes him as being “huddled against the barn-door fast asleep – a
miserable sight, and frightening too” (160). In this poem, Frost utilizes a form of speech known
as gossip, when two people speak of an absent third person. Silas is the absent third person, but
the reader fully understands his character due to Mary and Warren’s conversation. This form of
speech is made clear when Mary says to Warren, “Sh! not so loud: he’ll hear you” (159). Mary
further humanizes Silas by telling Warren of what Silas wants to accomplish. Silas has told Mary
that he “meant to clear the upper pasture, too” (161). Silas wants to achieve something before he
dies – he wants to finish what he left incomplete and mend ties with those he has let down.
Warren however, is still stubborn and does not want to feel compassion for Silas. Mary tells
Warren of Silas’s deep troubles with Harold Wilson, who left the farm years ago to go to school.
Silas and Harold used to have arguments about education as they worked alongside each other.
Warren still tries to seem as if he does not have compassion for the dying Silas by telling Mary
that he “took care to keep well out of earshot” (161). However, with this statement, Warren
really exemplifies the conversational distance that he kept from others. Those days still haunt
Silas because he feels that he could have swayed Harold to stay if he could only think of the
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right thing to say. Sometimes the right thing to say can make all the difference in someone’s
actions. Mary states, “I know just how it feels to think of the right thing to say too late” (162).
This subtle hint is said to try and urge her husband to realize that Silas does not have much time
and Warren should go to him. Mary does not outwardly tell her husband this, rather, she allows
him to make the connections for himself.
The theme of humanity is revealed at the end of section two when Mary highlights Silas’s
one accomplishment in life – bundling hay. She says it in a way that makes his organization of
hay sounds so profound. “He bundles every forkful in its place, and tags and numbers it for
future reference, so he can find easily dislodge it in the unloading. Silas does that well” (162).
Mary is celebrating precisely the “worthlessness” of Silas’s life. However worthless his life may
be, Silas is still human – it is a fact that cannot be taken away from him. More universally, Mary
is stressing that our humanity is not be deserved; rather it is just a fact of being human. As critic
Walter Jost points out, “we never say that we “deserve” humanity, but instead that we “have”
humanity” (Jost 410).
Section three starts with a beautiful image of the moon casting light onto Mary’s apron.
As mentioned in the analysis of section two, Frost uses names to convey deeper meaning in his
poetry. Mary can be connected with the Virgin Mary, a symbol of compassion and patience.
Mary, like the Virgin Mary, is a symbol for light in this poem – a symbol of the right path for
Warren to take. The connection of Mary and light is made more clear in the lines, “As if she
played unheard the tenderness that wrought on him beside her in the night” (163). Mary’s
tenderness and compassion are wearing on Warren’s heavy heart. She sits beside Warren still,
“unheard,” knowing that he will soon reach the connection that she has been waiting for him to
achieve.
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The climax of the poem is reached in section three when Mary and Warren discuss the
meaning of the word “home”. Mary comments that Silas “has come home to die” (163). Mary
stresses that “it all depends on what you mean by home” (163). Warren sees home as “the place
where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in” (163). He takes the literally meaning
of the word, but does not understand the philosophical dimension that Mary is trying to implore
him to view. She counters him by saying that home is “something you somehow haven’t to
deserve” (163). By saying this she acknowledges Silas’s humanity as well as both hers and
Warren’s. By solidifying Silas’s humanity, she is probing at Warren’s conscious, desiring him to
feel compassion. Mary also acknowledges the real meaning of what she meant when asking
Warren what his definition of home is - what Warren’s values are and what, essentially, their
values are as a couple.
As section three draws to an end, Warren considers Silas’s other options. Silas has a
brother that Warren and Mary know of just thirteen miles down the road. Why had Silas chosen
to stop by the farm rather than go to his family? Warren highlights how Silas’s brother is wealthy
– a “somebody.” Mary allows Warren to go through this thinking process, even offering to
contact Silas’s brother “if there is a need” (164). Mary knows, however, there will be no need to
contact Silas’s brother because she had stated previously that “he has come home to die” (163).
She nudges Warren in the direction that she wants him to go in by highlighting how pride, a part
of humanity, can make a person ashamed. She considers that Silas “won’t be made ashamed to
please his brother, worthless though he is” (164). She does not think Silas to be worthless, rather
she shows compassion towards him for just being human.
The final section encompasses Warren’s change of heart and the conclusion to the
question that has persisted throughout the poem; what do we do with Silas? Warren’s
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compassion is seen when he addresses Silas as “Si” showing that he is now seeing the humane
part of this dying worker. Mary urges him again to go and see Silas for himself, but begs him not
to laugh at his dreams to work again. Frost uses a metaphor when Mary says, “I’ll sit and see if
that small sailing cloud will hit or miss the moon” (165). The cloud is meant to be Silas, and the
moon is home. In the next stanza, “It hit the moon” (165), the reader understands that Silas has
passed away. Silas had made it home – to what he knew as his home – and could rest in peace.
Once again, Frost parallels Mary to light – “Then there were three there, making a dim row, the
moon, the little silver cloud, and she” (165). The scholar Salwa Nugali makes a good comparison
and sees this ordering as “heaven and man resonating with the natural ordering of the world”
(Nugali 385). If Mary is seen to parallel the Virgin Mary, then this would be very plausible.
However, it could also be taken to mean that, if the cloud is Silas, and the moon is home, then
adding she (Mary) would make it a family, thus making Silas part of the family. This would also
make the meaning of family elusive just as the meaning of home has been throughout the poem.
Warren comes back to Mary and utters the word “Dead” (165). The poem ends with a physical
touch and a solitary word. The holding of Mary’s hand expresses an unspoken bond between the
husband and wife. The final word, “Dead,” shows that sometimes all that is needed to convey a
complete meaning – mourning, understanding, joy, happiness, realization – is a single profound
word.
Some critics have viewed this poem as more of a dispute, rather than a conversation in
which two people come to reach an agreement on a given topic. Reuben Brower attempts to
convey the poem as a “debate between opposing temperaments” (Brower 164). However, this
can be feuded because Mary and Warren never debate on how something is to be viewed; instead
they talk about two totally different ideas. Frost teaches the reader a lesson on the type of
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language that he believes awakens people and makes them hear what is really being said. In his
poetry he does not use argumentation or debate; rather he chooses undertones and subtle hints, as
seen in “The Death of the Hired Man,” to get his characters, as well as his readers, to understand
the deep meanings that he wishes to convey. Throughout the poem, Mary knows the compassion
that the household, her “home,” stands for. She must use subtle hints to get her husband to come
to the realization that he too has the same feelings within himself to show Silas mercy and to
understand that humanity is not deserved, rather a fact of simply being human.
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Works Cited
Brower, Reuben. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. New York: Oxford
UP, 1963.
Frost, Robert. Robert Frost’s Poems: “The Death of the Hired Man”. New York: St. Martin’s
Paperbacks, 1971 158-165.
Jost, Walter. Lessons in the Conversation That We Are: Robert Frost’s “Death of the Hired
Man”. College English 58.4 (1996): 397-422 October 2010
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/378852>.
Nugali, Salwa. Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” Tagged and Numbered. Nottingham
University, UK. (2001) 381-387. October 2010
<http://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/cauce/pdf/cauce24/cauce24_22.pdf>.
Swennes, Robert H. Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost’s Poetry.
American Literature 42.3 (1970): 363-372 October 2010
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/2923911>.
Vogt, Victor E. Narrative and Drama in the Lyric: Robert Frost’s Strategic Withdrawal. Critical
Inquiry 5.3 (1979): 529-551 October 2010 <http://jstor.org/stable/13430000>.