"Home Burial"

There are two speakers in this poem, and you do not learn that they are involved until line 35. They have lost a child, who is buried on a hillside. The man speaking knows how burdened the woman speaker is. He just does not know how to talk to her about it. He begs for her to tell him what he can say, to teach him how he can speak to her, to help ease her mind. She does not want to talk about it. She is someone who carries her grief in silence, not talking about it, just holding it all in. He is the opposite, he wants to talk about the loss, to express their feelings and to learn how to help each other through a difficult time. He feels hurt that she won't let him in, and he feels that she is not honoring their child's memory by behaving the way that she is. She takes offense to what he says to her, taking it as criticism rather than an expression of his own feelings. She thinks that he is cold, she doesn't understand how he can talk about it, how he can function. You come to find that the man is someone who is trying to move on with his life, do what he has to do in order to carry on, maybe that means suppressing some of his own feelings, because why dwell on what you cannot change? She does not see it this way, she can't stand the way he talks about ordinary things while in the face of such a tragedy. She can't be around him because of it. I don't feel like one attitude is portrayed as "better" than the other. I think this is more of a story of how a couple is struggling to make it work in the midst of tragedy. He doesn't understand why she is grieving the way that she is, or how to talk to her about it. This is made apparent in lines 45-47 when he is telling her he doesn't know what to say. He is trying to talk her in to staying home with him, to work it out, in lines 56-59. She finally explodes, and tells him how she was disgusted to see that he was physically able to dig his own child's grave in lines 73-78. I know that she is in disbelief that he can carry on with every day conversation because she remembers what he said, so vividly, when he came inside from digging the grave in lines 92-93.