In Frost's “A Servant to Servants” the speaker describes her mad uncle. He was kept at home with his family, but within the house was another “house” made of hickory-wood bars, a cage to keep him safe and to keep others safe. He tore all his furniture to shreds, so, undisguised, his cell proclaimed clearly its only function as a cage. Oddly, he stripped himself naked but carried his suit of clothes carefully over his arm, as if on his way somewhere. He lived, animal-like, in a bed of straw and tore at things with his teeth. The man “went mad quite young,” and although he may have been bitten by a mad dog, the speaker believes it more likely that he was “crossed in love…. Anyway all he talked about was love” (11. 104-8). The other prominent figure in the speaker's memory is the bride, her mother, brought into the madhouse where “She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night.” The new bride witnesses the madness, she is in her role as bride an embodiment of the cause of his madness, and she is, as the speaker's mother, a propagational source of madness.