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The Silken Tent Essay

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The Silken Tent Essay
“The Silken Tent” by Robert Frost is an exquisite poem that expresses the characteristics of women by describing a silken tent. Frost is not comparing women to just an average tent, rather a specific silk tent. By describing a silken tent to convey the characteristics of women, Robert Frost in his poem “The Silken Tent uses enjambed lines and imagery to communicate the important aspects of a women and how women are able to be radiant, strong, and complex all simultaneously.
The use of enjambed lines in “The Silken Tent” helps emphasize important aspects of a woman. The first example that illustrates this idea is shown the first couple lines, “She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,” (Frost 1-3). These lines help emphasize the notion that women are soft, fine, radiant, and lustrous creatures. It also emphasizes the idea that women are at their prime at mid-age. By de-emphasizing this phrase, it shows how physical qualities are important aspects of women. This is because all of these characteristics are what has thought to be most desired by society through out the years. The physical qualities of radiance, softness, fineness, and lustrous in women have been prevalent and strived for by all generations of women. If a person was to look at recent medicinal developments in America in general, a considerable amount have been for cosmetic enhancements of really any part of the body that a woman doesn’t particularly like. If you were too look in the past as well, women would take birth control to attain bigger breasts to appear more lustrous. Women as a whole are always changing, but the idea of beauty still remains a constant theme among them all which is why it is an emphasized point in The Silken Tent.
Another use of enjambed lines that helps emphasize the most important aspects of a woman is shown towards the end of the poem. Frost writes: “But strictly



Cited: Frost, Robert. “The Silken Tent”. An Introduction to Poetry. 13th edition. Eds. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. 118. Print.

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