Robert Frosts poetry: the duality of the senex

The senex archetype in Frost's poetry is used extensively, it serves him to portray three antithetical aspects of human condition, aspects characterized by both positive and negative categories. These categories are not portrayed as static divisions, but as poles dinamically and complexly interrelated. This paper examines three of Frost's works "Mending Wall", "An Old Man's Winter Night" and "Directive" as examples for the study of the paradoxical senex consciousness. While the archetypal senex figures in the "Directive" and "An Old Man's Winter Night" represent primarily the antithetical aspects of the nature of humans, the senex protagonists in the "Mending Wall" reflect the inherent binary oppositions and ambivalence within the contradictory and paradoxical world of humankind. Thus, we can say, that Frost's portrayal of the archetype of the senex acknowledges the symbolic paradigm of the human condition.