What a Symbol Is

Lesson Goal

Students will learn what a symbol is, read Robert Frost's The Runaway literally first, and then say what the frightened colt could stand for. They'll also do a short quickwrite on paper about a time they learned something important and who helped.

Key Concepts

A symbol is a person, place or thing that has meaning in itself and stands for something beyond itself as well. The colt is a real colt in a real pasture, and he can also stand for a young person meeting something new and frightening. The snow is only weather, which is the point of the line the speaker gives the mother: it's only weather.

Reading order matters: first what is happening, then what it could mean. A symbol that skips the literal level is only a guess.

Where Students Get Stuck

Students tend to jump straight to the meaning and never check the plain reading, or they decide every object in a poem is a symbol. Ask for the line in the poem that supports the meaning. The wall and the pasture are only a wall and a pasture here.

There isn't one right answer for what the colt stands for. Accept any reading that the poem's lines can support, and ask the student to point at one.

Teaching Suggestion

Do the quickwrite before the poem, then come back to it afterward and ask the student who the helper was in his own story, and who the helper could be in Frost's. The poem's last two lines are about someone who should come and take the colt in.

Key Vocabulary

Symbol

A person, place or thing that has meaning in itself and also stands for something beyond itself.

Literal Meaning

What a poem says on the surface: who is there, what happens, and what is said.

Morgan

A breed of small, strong horse, which is the kind of colt in Frost's poem.

Winter-Broken

Frost's way of saying a young horse is not used to winter yet, the way a horse is broken to a saddle.