Home Burial Explication (edited a bit)

"Home Burial" by Robert Frost is about a man and a woman who have lost their newborn baby. Coincidentally, this poem isn't actually about this terrible occurrence, but rather how the parents deal with the situation. The blame between them only enhances their poor communication skills and mild sexism toward the opposite, generated by this personal experience, and this poem is basically a story of condemnation.

In line thirty-seven, the husband asks "Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?" and the woman replies with "I don't know rightly whether any man man." The wife is implying that men in general, not just her husband, aren't able to properly grieve. She accuses him of not caring because after he finished digging the child's grave, he came inside and spoke about decrepit fences. "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day will rot the best birch fence a man can build." Using this imagery, and the presentation of their broken relationship, the author showed us the moment their marriage began falling apart- the man unable to talk about their great loss, and the woman is so disgusted by the man's actions that she can't see him as anything other than an enemy. This image is also representing the man's need to be the one to fix their relationship, and how men and women grieve differently: a man may go out and a work, where a woman may need to talk about how she feels. Overall, this is a symbol for how a couple of problems can destroy something beyond repair, like the weather did to the strong fence, and like the loss of a child did to their relationship.

"What was it brought you up to think it the thing to take you mother-loss of a first child so inconsolably- in the face of love." In this line, the husband is replying to her earlier insult. The gender bias in this line is in the term "mother-loss". He is implying that the grief of a mother is very different than the grief of a father. He asks why she thinks she can grieve the child more thoroughly than he can, when she rejects his help when he tries to help her. He brings this same issue up again in lines 73-74 "God, what a woman! And it's come to this, a man can't speak of his own child that's dead." This is the same thing he asked before, but as if she has answered his question, this line is a statement instead. The gender roles come into play because he isn't stating that his wife is a difficult person is general, but that she is difficult because she is a woman. He is blaming her grief and their problems simply on the fact that she is a woman, kind of like what he did by telling her that they grieve differently because he is a man.

The last example of sexism in the poem is the last line "I'll follow and bring you back by force. I 
will!-". In this line, the husband is displaying his physical dominance over the woman by threatening to bring her back if she leaves him. Throughout the poem, the man and woman have been insulting each other's genders: the man calling the woman weak, the woman calling the man uncaring. The poem ends with no resolution, nor the end of the conflict, but it does end on a stalemate: the woman shut the door on him, a temporary win, but the man might go after her anyway.

So, what happens?