21 pages • 42 minutes read
Robert FrostPutting in the Seed
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Man and Nature
The most prominent theme of “Putting in the Seed” is the intimate, amorous connection between the speaker and the land he farms. In the opening four lines, the speaker suggests this connection is more enthralling and important than sustenance (he’s reluctant to go inside for dinner) and his wife (she’s the one who wants him to go inside for dinner). The speaker says, “[W]e’ll see / If I can leave off” (Lines 2-3). The implication is that he won’t be able stop planting, and the rest of the poem bears this notion, because in the remaining 8 lines, the speaker focuses on planting apple seeds and ignores his dinner and his wife.
Line 5 describes the apple seeds as “soft.” Line 6 describes adjacent seeds as “smooth” and “wrinkled.” This attention to the tactile nature of the seeds emphasizes that the farmer has a strong, physical connection to nature—he is handling seeds and putting them in the dirt. It also suggests a loving connection as the seeds are described in sensuous detail.
Next, the speaker tells his wife that he’s a “slave […] to passion,” but instead of passion for her, his passion is “for the earth” (Line 9). Of this passion, he says, “How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed” (Line 10). These lines make explicit that man and nature are connected—not just by the act of planting, but by a bond akin to human love and sex.
The final lines imagine the sprouting product of the union between man and nature. In Lines 11 through 14, the seed the speaker planted grows and pushes back up through the ground in which he planted it. This sprouting hasn’t actually happened, but the speaker imagines it happening in vivid detail: “The sturdy seedling with arched body comes / Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs” (Lines 13-14). Thus, readers come to understand that, just like his hands, the speaker’s imagination is deeply involved with nature and planting.
Love and Sex
Love and sex are rife in this poem. The title, “Putting in the Seed,” immediately alludes to a sexual relationship between two partners. The occasion for the poem is that a wife asks her husband to come inside for dinner. The poem is the husband’s reply. The reason the husband hasn’t come inside is that he’s bound up with another kind of love—his love for planting, or (as he puts it) “a springtime passion for the earth” (Line 9). The speaker exclaims, “How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed” (Line 10).
Moreover, the speaker’s descriptions of planting and growing are laden with sexual allusions. For example, the apple seeds are “soft,” “fallen,” and “not so barren” (Lines 5-6). These words have sexual connotations. Also, as the speaker imagines the seedling he planted growing, he says “with arched body comes” (Line 12)—an image and phrasing that allude to human intercourse.
Exploration of the World and the Imagination
At the outset of “Putting in the Seed,” the speaker is planting apple seeds in the dirt. As he does, his hands horizontally explore the apple seeds, the dirt, and some nearby seeds: “smooth bean and wrinkled pea” (Line 6). This horizonal exploration leads the speaker to imagine one of the seeds he’s planted sprouting: “The sturdy seedling with arched body comes / Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs” (Lines 13-14). This vertical growth hasn’t happened, of course, since the poem takes place as the speaker is putting the seeds into the earth. Instead, it’s taking place in the speaker’s imagination. Thus, in “Putting in the Seed”. one direction (the horizontal) is explored in the physical world, another direction (the vertical) in the speaker’s imagination; the poem positions the speaker at the intersection of these two movements.
This is important because it is a theme that Frost employs again and again in Mountain Interval. Most famously, “The Road Not Taken” positions the speaker at a crossroads: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (Frost, Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 105). The speaker wants to travel both roads, but he must make a choice. He stands for a long time in contemplation, imagining each of the paths, then makes his selection. Though he can only physically move down one path, his imagination allows him to explore the other path, as well.
As Robert McPhillips observes, many of the poems in Frost’s third book are characterized by a physical movement through space and time and another movement through the imagination (McPhillips, Robert. “Diverging and Converging Paths: Horizontal and Vertical Movement in Robert Frost’s Mountain Interval.” American Literature, vol. 58, no. 1, 1986, pp. 82-98). This exploration of the physical world in one direction and the imagination in another is a theme that ties “Putting in the Seed” to the rest of the poems in Mountain Interval.
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