22 pages • 44 minutes read
Robert FrostThe Death of the Hired Man
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1914A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Moon and the Cloud
When Warren agrees to go to the kitchen and talk with Silas, Mary waits for him outside and says she will watch to see whether that “small, sailing” cloud will “hit or miss” the moon (Lines 167-68). The late autumn moon casts the farm in a silvery richness. Earlier, Mary spread her apron as if to gather up the radiant light, symbolizing her generous spirit.
Now, as she waits, she watches as the cloud crosses the moon, casting the farm into a darker night. The choreography of the cloud obscuring the moon symbolizes death, specifically the death of the hired man himself but more broadly the death that awaits each person. Frost suggests that even if life seems difficult, full of unanticipated tragedies (symbolized by the night itself), death awaits, and death will make the dark, darker. The poem closes with the couple helpless now to help Silas. They are left in that forbidding dark with only each other for consolation, symbolized by their holding hands.
Money
The moral dilemma that centers Frost’s narrative—whether the farm couple should take in the itinerant farmhand—pivots on money in three ways. First, Warren cannot forgive Silas for abandoning the haying job before it was done, voiding without cause their contract. Silas skipped out—“Off he goes always when I need him most” (Line 18). He refuses to consider rehiring Silas even though, as Mary assures him, Silas is beyond abandoning him again. Second, the tension between Silas and the boy Harold Wilson the summer Silas helped was itself defined by class and income. Silas dismissed Harold’s fancy education as useless book learning, telling Mary, “He studied Latin like the violin” (Line 83). Silas’s skills, meanwhile, are not ones that give him steady (or any) employment: he can “find water with a hazel prong” (Line 86) and excels at building hay bales. Finally, the division between Silas and his brother, a successful banker who lives just a few miles away, pivots on money. The indigent Silas has no relationship with his brother, and Mary and Warren don’t know what happened, only that Silas values his dignity over his brother’s money. Money symbolizes division between people, even within families. Frost’s only characterization of Silas’s brother is his wealth, so the reader cannot assess whether Silas’s resistance to him is justified. Income alone isn’t enough basis to judge someone’s character.
A Perfect Bale of Hay
To Warren, Silas is a risk, a sponge, more useless than useful. Mary understands, however, that when Silas talks about making up to Harold Wilson these many years later, he speaks of his skill: making a nearly perfect bale of hale. Warren agrees, and over eight lines extols Silas’s skill, calling it his “one accomplishment” (Line 91).
Before machines made it simple, baling hay carefully was difficult, tedious, and backbreaking; the task was easy to do sloppily. In the unforgiving July sun, hay would be prickly, and the complicated architecture of a bale makes it heavy and unwieldly. A dying Silas wants to make amends with the boy he fought with by teaching him this skill. As Warren himself concedes, Silas bundled “every forkful in its place” (Line 91), each compact bale tagged and numbered. Silas’s desire to share that skill, to mentor the boy, to pass on his expertise, is based on his need, ironic and futile, to right his life’s wrongs and leave his mark so he can die honorably.
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