A Passing Glimpse - Robert Frost: Summary | CBSE

The 'Passing glimpses' is a typical of Robert Frost's poetry, in various ways. The poet Robert Frost in his poem 'A Passing glimpse' has shown us very tactfully that in everyday mechanical,  monotonous, modern life of our , we often don't get time to look at the beautiful nature around us.
  The poem 'A passing glimpse' opens with the speaker refering to the passing glimpse of  flowers seen from the rapidly moving car of a train . The flowers symbolises the delicate beauty of nature which is timeless and eternal while in comparison, life is bounded by the borders of time and is destined we to perish. In our daily rat race we often fail to pay heed to the happenings around us and move on without even noticing them. The tracks of life are long and lay farther than what can be perceived through our eyes
   The poet, through the moving train gets glimpses of many flower beside the track. He tries to guess the names of these flowers and on doing so understands that his guesses will prove to be wrong. He wants to get out of the train to spot those flowers but unfortunately he cannot manage to . He then doubts whether they were his imagination which brushed across his mind.
In all of it we can identify well that it is this mechanical life that imprisons us and thus in this time bound life we hardly get time to stop by and appreciate the nature around us and it's timeless beauty. Although we desire to look back, barely we get a chance. But even after telling us the various lacks of a monotonous materialistic life he ends the poem with quite a promising , optimistic, couplet which tells that a glimpse of heaven can only be perceived by those who do not get the chance "to look too close" . Thus, beauty multiplies when we step back and look at it from a distance, rather than examining it critically and closely.