“Home is the place where when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”“I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” – Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”
Warren, the father figure in the poem, makes the first statement, and Mary, his wife, responds with the second sentence. Silas, an irresponsible hired hand on the farm who leaves Warren in the busiest time of the year, loses Warren’s respect because “What help he is there’s no depending on. Off he goes when I need him most.” The last time Warren hired Silas he offered the hired hand an ultimatum. During the last harvest Warren gave Silas his final chance: “I told him so last haying, didn’t I? / If he left then, I said, that ended it.” Warren is a just, honest man.
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Mary has discovered that Silas has returned to the farm again even after Warren’s stern warning and says he has come “to ditch the meadow” and “to clear the upper pasture,” that is, to do an honest day’s work. But Mary senses that Silas’s real reason for returning to the farm is “he has come home to die.” Because Warren and Mary are not members of his family, only acquaintances for many years, Warren finds Mary’s use of the word “home” strange because they are unrelated.
Warren wonders why Silas does not go to his brother’s family in his final days if he is aware of his impending death. Mary senses the true reason for Silas’s puzzling decision to return to the farm after being expelled: “Worthless though he is, / He won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.” Silas, a n’er do well vagabond who lives from hand to mouth, nevertheless has too much self-respect to beg from a rich brother, a successful banker. He chooses Warren and Mary’s farm rather than his brother’s family because Warren and Mary treat him with justice and mercy, with both conditional and unconditional love—the essence of a home.
Warren’s definition of home describes home in terms of justice, duty, obligation: when you have to go there, they have to take you in (italics mine). Warren’s approval of Silas—his fatherly conditional love– rested on Silas’s keeping a promise and not quitting during the harvest labor. Warren does not treat him as a child or beggar but as a man—as a man bound by his word of honor.
Silas holds no grudge or resentment toward Warren even after his angry words and final warning because Silas respects Warren’s integrity and knows that Warren treated him fairly. Silas, in other words, wants to be treated in the way a good father treats his son—with firmness and not with sentimentality, with manly dignity and not with delicate softness. That is why Silas did not confess he was dying, desperate, or destitute. He told Mary he came to do an honest day’s work for a fair wage, “to ditch the meadow.” Silas wanted to prove he was an honorable man.
Mary’s definition of home describes home in terms of gift, grace, and gratuity—“somehow something you haven’t to deserve (italics mine). Mary’s welcoming hospitality to Silas expresses a mother’s unconditional love—regardless of his faults and failures. Mary insists on Warren treating Silas with gentleness and mercy: “‘Be kind,’ she said.” Warren and Mary’s home, then, provides Silas with both love and discipline, both mercy and justice. Warren’s strength and firmness complement Mary’s kindness and mercy. Silas, like a prodigal son, comes home because Warren and Mary respect him as human being deserving of dignity and value—a human being with a body, heart, and soul whose physical, emotional, and spiritual needs receive loving attention. If Silas is dying, he does not have to earn the right to succor and forgiveness.
When Silas notices Silas sleeping by the barn door looking weak and sickly, Mary welcomes him into the home and offers him refreshment and friendliness: “I dragged him to the house/ And gave him tea and tried to make him smoke./I tried to make him talk about his travels.” When Warren learns that Silas has come home to die, his determined justice yields to his merciful heart: “When was I ever anything but kind to him?” For all his flaws Silas is never reduced to a good for nothing, tramp, or useless person. Even though Silas is not productive, successful, or worthy, he is still entitled to a home by virtue of his humanity, as “something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”
Besides all the physical comforts of food, shelter, and comfort, Silas also needs the emotional blessings of the home: a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of affirmation, and the feeling of being loved. Silas goes home to die because Warren’s conditional love and Mary’s unconditional love fulfill the deepest longings of the heart—the need not only for justice but also mercy, the need not only to be loved but also to be missed and remembered for who he is, not the work he does.
Absent Warren’s conditional love, mercy without justice dissolves into sentimentality. Absent Mary’s unconditional love, justice hardens into cruelty. A home needs a father and a mother, not single-parent or fatherless families. A child needs the integration of paternal and maternal love to be complete and balanced.
Just as a child needs the strength of the father and the gentleness of the mother to acquire both a disciplined will and a compassionate heart, every person needs the culture of the home to learn the meaning of both duty and kindness and the importance of both justice and charity. Man does not live by work or justice alone but by the gifts that he does not deserve and can never repay.
Mitchell Kalpakgian, Ph.D. has completed fifty years of teaching beginning as a teaching assistant at the University of Kansas, continuing as a professor of English at Simpson College in Iowa for thirty-one years, and recently teaching part-time at various schools and college in New Hampshire. As well as contributing to a number of publications, he has published seven books: The Marvelous in Fielding’s Novels, The Mysteries of Life in Children’s Literature, The Lost Arts of Modern Civilization, An Armenian Family Reunion (a collection of short stories), Modern Manners: The Poetry of Conduct and The Virtue of Civility, and The Virtues We Need Again. He has designed homeschooling literature courses for Seton Home School, and he also teaches online courses for Queen of Heaven Academy and part-time for Northeast Catholic College.
