deciding factor, because even as the latch is a threat of a breach in the boundaries that he has set for their relationship and for her own ability to grow and expand within that relationship, he is still unable to comprehend and allow her to experience her own grief and accept her emotions as well-founded, not just a sign that she overdoes it a little. After his show of control and emotional ignorance still, even after he has supposedly seen what she sees, there is nowhere for Amy to move but out of the house. First, however, she recounts the progression of the grief . This is the single most visual scene in the entire poem. Amy says that, while she is inside the house going down the stairs and up the stairs(83), her husband was outside digging their childs grave, making the gravel leap and leap into the air(79). However, when he returned to the house and the darkened parlor, he stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry(91-92). So it is here we see that it is not her inability to share her emotion that has dissolved their relationship or his inability to make an outward show of emotion, it is his inability to share that emotion with her and to bring it into the house past the entry. It is his emotional control that prevents this. All he can bring to her is three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build (96-97). Here, again is the imagery of confinement, but it is a rotting fence this time. It is this image that he brings to her, and although she does not see it as relevant to the darkened parlor, it is her husbands failed attempt to bring this image of their childs death rotting his emotional and physical control within his own life. This image, however, is foreign and unreachable to Amy, and all she can do is see this and his digging of their childs grave as an offense to the window of her own emotion. Here, she also makes another spatial analogy. The em...
