The Death of the Hired Man (Themes)

Themes

Duty and Responsibility

“The Death of the Hired Man” uses an extended dialogue between Mary and Warren to explore questions of duty and responsibility. The poem opens with Mary “musing on the lamp-flame at the table / Waiting for Warren.” She does not seem to have anything else to do but to wait for her husband and stare at candle; or alternatively, she has forsaken her other duties to wait for him. This opening image prompts questions about her role in the relationship. She does not even wait a moment (after hearing his step) to tell him the news, running “on tip toe down the darkened passage.” After she shuttles him out the door back onto the porch, she instinctively takes “the market things from Warren’s arms / And set[s] them on the porch.” This first silent exchange between the two implies a strong sense of duty she may feel toward her husband Warren. But as soon as they begin speaking, we learn her sense of responsibility is to kindness more than to some sort of marital obedience. Her first two sentences are a quick “Silas is back” and a plea for Warren to “Be kind.”

During the last haying season, Silas quit his job and left Warren and Mary to make up his work. Warren, wanting to keep his promise not to hire Silas back, does not feel much responsibility for an old farm hand he cannot depend on: “What good is he? Who else will harbor him / At his age for the little he can do?” Any duty he owed to Silas was severed when Silas walked off the job — that is, if Silas was just an employee who came on a few seasons ago. Is Silas really “nothing” to them, as Warren would insist, “any more / Than was the hound that came as stranger?” We learn as the conversation develops that Silas has been working for them for a long time, long enough to be incorporated into the family. Mary is perhaps more in touch with this sense of family duty at the beginning of the poem, though Warren begins to rethink his attitude toward Silas. When Mary tells him Silas is not doing well, that she found him “huddled against the barn-door fast asleep,” Warren grows more concerned, asking “Where did you say he’d been?”

Silas claims to still feel a duty toward the farm when he tells Mary “he meant to clear the upper pasture” and “ditch the meadow.” He has returned with a plan for the work, deciding it would be a good idea if they hired his old coworker, Harold Wilson, back too. Silas may also feel like family to the couple, as they had given him food, shelter, and respect for so many years. He asks for available work, though it is soon clear he has actually come to the house to spend his last days. With this realization, the issues of work and family responsibilities become larger issues, including the duty we have to guard human dignity and responsibility to strangers. Warren, echoing Cain in Genesis (demanding “Am I my brother’s keeper?”), asks Mary why Silas did not go to his own brother’s house to die; it should be his responsibility to tend to the dying Silas. The brother is a prosperous “director in the bank,” so he would have no problems paying the bills. “I think his brother ought to help, of course,” he rationalizes to Mary, “He ought of right / To take him in.”

Although Warren finally agrees to go in and see Silas for himself, having reconsidered his distanced stance, Mary still feels responsible for the man’s dignity and self-respect. She is not going to tolerate any of Warren’s possible harsh words, begging “But Warren, please remember how it is: / He’s come to help you ditch the meadow. / He has a plan. You mustn’t laugh at him.” Mary does not want to disrespect Silas. Silas wants to come “home” and work and die in peace; Warren does not believe it is his duty to offer his house to the man who walked off the job in the middle of haying season.

The simple question seems to be “What is ‘home’?” Once again Frost reminds us it is a matter of responsibility: either home is “the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in,” as Warren asserts, or vise versa, as compassionate Mary corrects him, “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”