Putting in the Seed

Frost is famous for capturing the cadences of American speech in his poetry. “Putting in the Seed” is a good example of this because the poem is set up as a speech act (a farmer is responding to his wife’s request that he come inside for dinner) and contains the regular rhythms of humans speech. In the opening lines, the phrases “come to fetch me,” “supper’s on the table,” “we’ll see,” and “If I can leave off” (Lines 1-3) all have a conversational feeling to them. These are easy, common, casual phrases: They’re conversational rather than baroquely poetic. In Line 5, the revision of “Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite” has the feeling of a man muttering to himself. These casual phrases and rhythms in the opening lines are underscored by the fact that there are only two words longer than two syllables in the poem: “burying” and “tarnishes” (Lines 3, 12). Longer words do crop up in conversation and in “Putting in the Seed,” but they are not as common as shorter, more direct diction choices.