SOURCE: "Frost's 'The Fear': Unfinished Sentences, Unanswered Questions," in College Literature, Vol. XV, No. 3, 1988, pp. 199-207.

In the following essay, Perrine explicates Robert Frost's "The Fear," drawing attention to its "syntax of mystery"—its mood of tension and anxiety, its numerous unfinished sentences, and its undefined relationships among central characters in the poem.

I

Amy Lowell's notorious misinterpretation of Robert Frost's poem "The Fear,"¹ in which (she tells us) the protagonist comes face to face with her first husband at the end of the poem and is possibly killed by him,² had always seemed to me simply a bizarre critical aberration until I assigned the poem for study in a graduate seminar and found my brightest students as confused about its ending as Lowell. This led me to review the criticism of the poem, where I found that, although Lowell had been firmly put in her place (most...