I need to find a complete analysis of Robert Frost's poem "Reluctance" It needs to include the purpose, theme, setting, tone, speaker, and style of the poem. The style must contain a rhykming structure. This I dont know how to use. Please help.

Somehow I think that your assignment is to DO a complete analysis, not FIND one.

For rhyming structure, look at how the lines end. Assign letters to each different type of rhyme. List them in order of lines. Looking at the first stanza, we have three words that rhyme- wended, descended, ended. Since the first one is the second line, we will call this rhyme 'B.' The other lines in this stanza don't rhyme. The accepted letter for 'no rhyme' is X.

The rhyme scheme for the first stanza is XBXBXB.

pam

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

There is some info. here:

[yumnyum.blogspot.com]

and here:

[www.frostfriends.org]


Les

Note also there are three feet (beats) in all lines except the last line in each stanza. Is there a label for this form? Something like sapphics, but different, yes. Reminds one of Shelley's La Belle Dame stanza endings. The meter is consistently anapestic, which gives a lift, or running effect to the lines, since the speaker is climbing, wending, etc.

The odd-numbered lines have masculine endings (single syllable) and the even ones feminine (trailing syllables at the end). This makes the odds acatalectic and the evens catalectic? Or is it hypermetric? Chesil would know, but he is long missing, unlikely to ever return.

The masculine/feminine endings give it a 'ballad meter' effect to my reading, but others may feel differently.