By Robert Frost (1913)
If tired of trees I seek again mankind,
Well I know where to hie me—in the dawn,
To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn.
There amid lolling juniper reclined,
Myself unseen, I see in white defined
Far off the homes of men, and farther still,
The graves of men on an opposing hill,
Living or dead, whichever are to mind.
And if by noon I have too much of these,
I have but to turn on my arm, and lo,
The sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow,
My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.
Analysis
“The Vantage Point” considers the balance between human distance and natural closeness. From a hill where cattle graze, the speaker looks down upon the homes of the living and the graves of the dead, holding both in view. The sonnet’s octave surveys community; its sestet returns to the hillside itself, to scent, heat, and the tiny movement of an ant. Observation yields to participation.
Frost’s shift from sight to touch marks a turning inward: knowledge begins in sense, not abstraction. The poem’s modest turn — “I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant ”— shows how perspective becomes empathy. By ending not with vision but with smell, Frost grounds philosophy in the body. The vantage point thus becomes not a place of superiority but of shared mortality.