The Wood-Pile by Robert Frost | Analysis

This video is not sponsored by the timber merchant "The Wood Pile" who came up on Google when I searched for this poem... though their company name is priceless. I hope it's a Frostie reference. Here's a link to the poem (if you are here for the timber merchant you'll just have to look them up yourself): https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...

As always, if you want/need closed captions to better understand the video, just drop me a comment and I'll be happy to add them.

Thank you to Hajun Seo for requesting this video. Hope you like it! :)

So someone called me a "QUEEN" in the comments of one of my videos the other day (again thank you so much Hassan Mirza!). After I'd finished being speechless and flabbergasted by the amazing compliment, I thought to myself, "Queen of Robert Frost poetry? I'll take that." However having rewatched this video I'm doubting my worthiness of the title, as around 12 minutes in I literally say "I have no clue what this means - help me!"

Just proves I guess that I am not perfect and more importantly... poetry is freaking hard to study. PLEASE nobody judge your self worth on how well you can understand and analyse poems. As I briefly touched upon in the video when I talked about suicide - poetry is seen as complex and deep and intelligent FOR A REASON. It's not designed to be instantly and easily broken down by everyone who reads it - especially not teenagers with limited life experience (and frankly, much better things to do) who have 20 poems thrown at them and are expected to evaluate their meaning, memorise quotes from them and then write a succinct essay on a surprise topic about them in a single hour exam.

Yep, it's time for a good old-fashioned rant about the education system, everyone. As I tick off more and more RF poems from my list of ones to analyse, I get more and more overwhelmed by the prospect of cramming all this information into my head in preparation for one exam and boiling it all down to one essay. If you didn't know, I'm currently studying for a Cambridge International A Level in English Literature (9695). And like wtf are they actually playing at making us memorise insightful points about TWENTY POEMS (let alone all the other texts) for an exam in which we'll only be asked about one or two of them?! I feel really lucky that I've been able to get to grips with the poems through video-making because I feel it makes it a lot more interactive and memorable than purely written notes. I have a pretty good memory too and I tend to work quite well in an exam setting. But there are plenty of people out there who don't and I feel like this is a ridiculously overcomplicated way of doing it.

I know I'm being ungrateful here because obviously I'm insanely lucky to be getting an education and qualifications, and I would much rather take this exam than loads of the others out there. But I just wanted to express that I think they make A Levels difficult for students in stupid ways that are completely unnecessary. I'm not talking about difficulty in terms of content here - I mean that failure in this exam could be affected by me just having a bad day, or not being able to remember things right. There's got to be a more efficient way of assessing literature skills.

Wow OK this description is going in some unexpected directions. Back to the actual video... I said in the narration that white feathers have historical connotations of surrender. I have learned since that a more accurate term would probably be cowardice. However, I think that still goes with the idea of the bird beckoning the narrator back to safety, so it's still a valid point to make.

I mentioned Modernism and Romanticism in this video as well which I think are really important concepts to know about when discussing Robert Frost. I broke them down in this video, around 16 minutes in:    • A Soldier by Robert Frost | Analysis  

And of course we must not forget to thank my sources for this video. If you want more info on this poem give these a look - there's plenty I didn't include:

https://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/fro...
   • The Wood Pile revision- Robert Frost   (for some reason I'm obsessed with this guy's voice)
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs...
https://prezi.com/mjdottedxumb/robert...
https://www.tes.com/teaching-resource... (I didn't pay for this, the preview material actually has some interesting info in itself. just prepare to feel super inadequate compared to the whiz kid student who came up with all those great points)
http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_p... (there are some BRILLIANT points made in the comments of this one... just watch out for the trolls)
http://frostpoetry.blogspot.com/2010/...