a man completely cut off from society He is someone who walks in the darkness of his own loneliness Longing for Human Connection In The Death of the Hired Man alienation is shown through Silas Silas is an old farm worker He is very sick He returns to the farm of Warren and Mary He thinks they are his close ones However Warren does not trust Silas He refuses to take him back because he has been unreliable Silas left the couple during the busy haying season This makes Silas feel even more helpless and lonely Mary however understands his loneliness He says to Warren He Silas has come home to die Silas does not go to his brother who is a rich bank director Maybe he does not want to shame his educated brother This shows how lonely Silas is He chooses to come back to Warren and Mary instead In the end Silas dies So Silas s story is the story of an alienated man who seeks human connection in his final moments Yearning for Childhood In Birches Frost presents alienation differently The speaker sees some birch trees bent by ice-storms He imagines that the trees are bent this way because a young boy has been swinging them Then he remembers that as a boy he also swung on birches It was a joyful childhood activity Now as an adult life feels stressful and full of responsibilities The speaker wishes he could go back to childhood and enjoy the simple joy As he says I once myself a swinger of birches And so I dream of going back to be But he knows this is impossible This is also a kind of alienation His longing to return makes him feel separated from his joyful childhood Wall and Separation In Mending Wall Frost shows alienation through the repairing of a wall between two neighbors The speaker thinks the wall is unnecessary He argues that his apple trees will never get across the wall and eat his neighbour s pines Moreover there are no cows to keep in or out The speaker feels the wall only keeps people apart But his neighbor believes Good fences make good neighbors It shows that sometimes different opinions separate people from each other Alienation and Tree The speaker of Tree at my Window is also lonely He talks to a tree outside his window He says the tree faces storms but still stands firm Just like the tree he also faces hardships in his life The speaker is talking and comparing his struggle to a lonely tree This tells us that he is just as lonely as the tree In conclusion alienation is a major theme in Robert Frost s poems His poems show people who are cut off from society from others or from their own past No other poet of his time wrote so beautifully about the simple lives and feelings of common men