This short poem tells of a lonely man seeking human contact, and his fleeting encounter with a buck who just couldn't care less.

The poem begins with the man, a nameless individual in a mysterious, unidentified location. We learn little about him at first, other than the fact that he appears isolated: “He thought he kept the universe alone”. The loneliness of his physical location appears to support this view: he is surrounded by a lake, by “tree-hidden” cliffs, by a “boulder-broken beach”.

Desire for Human Contact

Despite his feeling that he is the only person in the universe, he longs to be proved wrong, and often calls out across the lake, his words being met only by “the mocking echo of his own”. This undefined individual represents a universal emotion: virtually every human being wants and needs contact with others, “not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response”.

Then one day, he hears something other than the teasing, frustrating echo of his own voice: “in the far distant water splashed”, and the man hears something swimming to shore. Who could it be? Has someone come at last to relieve his solitude?

The visitor turns out to be a deer:

Instead of proving human when it neared

And someone else additional to him,

As a great buck it powerfully appeared.

Not only does the new arrival prove to be an animal, but he seems to have little interest in the man who has awaited his presence. He simply emerges from the water and stumbles off along the rocky beach, leaving the man alone once more.

Action versus Inactivity

The contrast between the two characters in the poem is striking. The poem begins with inactivity: the only action the man performs is to “cry out”, otherwise he spends his time thinking, waiting and hoping. The buck, on the other hand, is associated with a range of dynamic verbs: “swim”, “pushing”, “landed pouring like a waterfall”, “stumbled” and “forced” all give an idea of a great flurry of activity once the buck appears. His physical strength is clear from these verbs and from the line “as a great buck it powerfully appeared”, unlike the man whose power seems linked with mental rather than physical activity.

The Structure of the Poem

The structure of the poem reinforces these ideas. The final twelve lines of this twenty line poem are all one long sentence, encouraging the reader to speed up as they enter those lines describing the buck, coming to a climax in the final three lines which all begin with “and”, stressing the idea that the actions of the deer follow one after another without pause. The regular rhyme scheme and use of iambic pentameter also add to this very regular and insistent rhythm.

Ultimately, though, the poem is to end in disappointment. The buck is unwilling and unable to provide the man with the companionship he needs, and the whole event proves nothing but an anticlimax: “- and that was all”. The hyphen forces a pause upon us, and the use of four monosyllabic words after the whirl of activity that has preceded this line brings us, and the man, back down to earth with a bump.

Why is this Poem Called “The Most of It”?

So why call the poem “The Most of It”? Perhaps it represents the idea that nature is unable to fulfil a supportive role in the lives of humans, this brief encounter representing the most the man could have hoped for. Or maybe we should see it as something of an admonishment: in this poem, we see the buck busy and active, getting on with and enjoying his life, while the man wishes his away waiting for something that might never happen.

See further discussion of Frost's poems including Road Not Taken, Dust of Snow , Putting in the Seed, Nothing Gold Can Stay, and Stopping by Woods.