Robert Frost was a famous American poet well known for his detailed philosophical poems. Frost's poem "To Earthward" was published in 1923 and illustrates the naivety and sweetness of a past love, and how, when one grows older, such a love will be coveted again. Say no to plagiarism. Get a custom essay on "Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned"? Get an original essay In Robert Frost's "To Earthward," the speaker returns to a youthful romance and describes it as all-consuming, before moving on to the present and how life has changed. Through the inclusion of diction, figurative language, and his comparisons to nature and the past, the speaker makes his message resonate with the reader. In “To Earthward,” Frost included a set of four stanzas in which a speaker reflected on a past love. The first stanza is rich in imagery and includes the line “The love on the lips was touched/As sweet as I could bear.” This sentence brings up the image of kissing without using the word itself; the speaker's youthful romance centered on sweet kisses. The speaker then evokes the image of senseless love with the lines: “And once it seemed too much;/I lived on air.” When the couple wasn't kissing, just being in each other's presence was enough to keep them content, and breathing the same air was just as sweet as the many kisses they shared. The first stanza of the poem uses imagery to illustrate a young couple in love and emphasizes that simply breathing together was enough to be satisfied. Frost's second and third stanzas include the speaker's recollection of himself and a lover in a meadow. The speaker recounts an experience, “Descent at Dusk” that left him “swirling and aching.” The inclusion of this diction alludes to a feeling of dizziness; the speaker took his lover to watch the sunset, and his giddiness surely came from the combination of fragrant flowers and his blissful love. The sweet smell came from “the sheaves of honeysuckle, which, when gathered together, tremble, with dew on the joints.” While in the meadow, the speaker gathered honeysuckles for his lover, and they left the dew of the refreshing twilight air on his hands. The speaker's syntax in these lines ends the stanza with a rhyme, continuing the pattern of previous stanzas. The diction and syntax included in the second and third stanzas evoke a dreamlike feeling, reflecting the speaker's giddiness and feelings toward his lover. Frost's fourth stanza is the last to reflect on the past, and symbols of candy and roses are included to represent young love. The speaker claims that he "craved strong sweets, but these / seemed strong when I was young." He refers to his inexperience as a young man; now that he is older, he realizes that his love, in the beginning, was pure and untainted by reality. He thought his love could conquer all, but now he realizes that maintaining a relationship takes work. He goes on to state that “The petal of the rose/That was what stung.” The speaker discusses the fact that love is often bittersweet. Reality catches up with him and his rose petal, a symbol for his lover, ends up hurting him. His innocent love turned out not to be as steadfast as he thought. The last four stanzas bring the reader back to the present, and once again there is a change in diction. In the fifth and sixth stanzas, the speaker now finds himself in a sparkless relationship, and instead of using the word sweet to describe.