More House School
English Department
LITB1 Robert Frost
Robert Frost:
An Unstamped Letter
What’s the story?
In this poem, the speaker is ‘just a tramp’, who spends the night in the garden of a rural
house and leaves a letter (unstamped, obviously) in the letterbox the following morning.
The poem takes the form of ‘this note’, in which the speaker tells of how he spent the night
under a juniper tree, which acted as a ‘blanket’, but awoke at around 2 a.m., just in time to
witness a supernova (the collision of two stars). The sight caused a similar collision within
the ‘tramp astrologer’: he explains how two dormant memories merged in his mind,
resulting in a moment of insight: ‘for a moment all was plain’. He dwells on how different
the lives of he and his ‘involuntary host’ must be, yet hints that for all his poverty, he has
access to the riches that come from experiencing the natural world. He wonders if the
farmer may have experienced a similar thing when working in the fields. The poem ends
with the juxtaposition of his legal status: ‘in forma pauperis’ (in the form of a pauper), and
his being the writer of such a letter/poem, regardless.
Essay Questions
You should answer at least one of the questions below.
1. “Some have called me a nature poet, because of the background, but I’m not a nature
poet. There’s always something else in my poetry” Faggen, 109.
What, in your opinion, is the ‘something else’ in ‘An Unstamped Letter’?
2. ‘An Unstamped Letter’ explores a theme that preoccupied Frost: the power of nature to
educate, teach and inspire.
Write about the theme of education in this poem.
3. The overall impression is that there is great power in experience, and the tramp
contends that different life paths hold equally valuable experiences. Judy Richter.
How does Frost explore ideas of in/equality in this poem?
4. In 1913, in a letter to one of his former students, Frost wrote: I alone of the English
writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of
sense… The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that
cuts off the words… It is pure sound – pure form.
In what ways does sound contribute to our reading of ‘An Unstamped Letter’?
5. Compare ‘An Unstamped Letter’ with Walt Whitman’s poem ‘When I Heard
the Learn’d Astronomer’, below:
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the
lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
6. Many of Frost’s poems could be classified as ‘itinerant journey poems’.
How does ‘An Unstamped Letter’ compare to some of Frost’s other ‘itinerant
journey poems’?
Except where otherwise stated, all quotations are from The Cambridge Introduction to
Robert Frost, Robert Faggen, CUP, 2008