"Gathering Leaves" by Robert Frost

In the poem “Gathering Leaves,” Robert Frost emphasizes the futility and emptiness of the task. He starts off the poem by remarking how useless spades and spoons are for picking up leaves. He then remarks how light are the leaves, even in vast quantities and he continues this idea in the second to last stanza. In the second stanza, the description that he “[makes] a great noise…like rabbit and deer running away” suggests that he does not particularly want to rake the leaves and that the leaves seem to try to run away from him. Also the word choice indicates that all of the “great noise” has no purpose. In the third stanza, the narrator tries to embrace the leaves probably to carry them to the shed, but the leaves “[flow] into his face” as if they are mocking him. The parallelism of “load” and “again” in the fourth stanza is correlated well with the repeated process of carrying leaves to the shed. At the end of the stanza, Frost asks himself whether he has achieved anything to which the answer is presumably “nothing” even without the lines following. Frost wryly calms himself by rather unconvincingly saying that “a crop is a crop” no matter how useless. Although the final rhetorical question can be taken just as wearily as the rest of the poem because the leaves seem to just keep cascading down, the positive connotation of “harvest” raises the tone slightly. Additionally, if it were not leaves, an endless harvest such as this would be a great blessing. The futility of this poem recalls one of King Lear’s problems. Since he has given away most of his possessions and power, the King becomes extremely frustrated and distraught that he can no longer control who waits on him and where he finds shelter. Just like Frost, he comes to fret that he has harvested a useless crop, which, in his case, is his thankless daughters.