The Elements of “A Girl’s Garden”

In “A Girl’s Garden” by Robert Frost, the theme expressed is the unique pleasure of a rural childhood, as well as the girl’s youthful exuberance about the garden she grew. The speaker is a neighbor of the girl, who is now an adult woman living in town. The speaker tells the story, attempting to convey the importance of the garden to the adult woman because of the joy she still takes in reminiscing about her experiences, regardless of the perceived success of her efforts. This is achieved by excellent use of tone, rhythm, and imagery.

The tone of the poem is consistently light and pleasant. From the beginning the girl remembers the experience fondly, as shown in lines -4 “likes to tell how one spring when she was a girl on the farm, she did a childlike thing.” The poem goes on to describe how the young girl asked her father for a garden of her own. The father’s response of “Why not?” and decision to give her a small, walled-off piece of useless land, as well as his comments in lines 1-16 suggests that he was humoring her because he knew it would be quite an undertaking. In lines 7 � 40 “her crop was a miscellany when all was said and done, a little bit of everything, a great deal of none”, the text at first seems to change tones. Yet the speaker ends the poem by reiterating the woman’s pleasure of telling the story of when she was a “farmer”. When taken into context with the rest of the poem, the tone has not changed. Regardless of the outcome, the theme is that the value was in

the learning experience and the pleasure the woman has even as an adult. The poem is mild-mannered and seeks to take the reader away from their daily life, as opposed to requiring heavy philosophic or morbid contemplations.

The poem is very rhythmic and melodic. It follows a prescribed pattern with every second and fourth lines rhyming. Each