Explication of "Departmental".
Societal parallels and clever allusion to grim processes form most of Robert Frost's poem "Departmental", the entire piece is essentially one large metaphor. This work is written in couplets of Iambic Trimeter, every line rhymes with its adjacent counterpart. The very rhythm of this piece, in its monotonous order, exemplifies it's underlying message of social departmentalism. Further analysis can also reveal that Frost accepts this monotony as a part of nature. One can interpret that Frost is using the ant's likeness of human civilization to exhibit that humans should not be as such, that we should care more for our own and the world around us. That the primitive nature of a colony of ants should not so closely resemble that of human society. That our sense of empathy has been lost in our departmentalism. .
Through analyzation, one will find that this poem is a series of metaphors and soliloquies which compare the workings of an ant's society to our own, by personifying it as so. One must observe with the knowledge that it is, essentially a singular (gargantuan)metaphor; which means one can assumes that every line is a comparison to human society. The opening lines set the scene with an ant on a tablecloth, "An ant on the tablecloth/Ran into a dormant moth/Of many times his size./He showed not the least surprise." The reader is misled by the opening, as one might assume that the poem entails the story of two insects, a "dormant moth" and "An ant on a tablecloth", but the next few lines immediately demolish this theory, as Frost writes "His business wasn't with such./He gave it scarcely a touch,/And was off on his duty run." The ant recognizes the moth but did not pay attention to it because "His business wasnt with such" so he "was off on his duty run." This is an allegorical method of describing the lives of human beings, claiming that the need to complete one's socially accepted task is greater than one's personal curiosities.
