Robert Frost

The Most of It

The Most of It - meaning Summary

Longing Met by Nature's Answer

The poem depicts a man who cries out for a true reciprocation of feeling but receives only echoes from the landscape. He hopes for an original, human response, yet the only embodiment of reply is a powerful stag that bursts through the rocks and then disappears. Frost contrasts the speaker’s expectation of interpersonal reciprocity with the indifferent, physical responses of the natural world, suggesting loneliness, miscommunication, and the gap between human desire for mutual recognition and the impersonal forms nature actually returns.

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He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own love back in copy speech, But counter-love, original response. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the embodiment that crashed In the cliff’s talus on the other side, And then in the far distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

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