Mending Wall

What is so important about mending a wall? Robert frost a down to earth, phenomenon has used his supernatural skills to write a poem which may seem to be a simple, ordinary poem, yet what lays hidden behind the veils may be unraveled. That is the spiritual world that you and me may learn to understand the philosophical basis of human nature that provokes the human revolution. Believe it or not this poem was ingeniously devised by Robert Frost to articulately open up a world of ideas that acumen imagination and its complexities. That is what I will be elaborating on in terms of textual evidence.

Like many of Frost’s poems, ‘mending wall’ involves a journey. We are introduced to two farmers in an annual meeting at the wall that separates their properties. They walk the length of the wall, repairing damage that has been done during the year. This process allows Frost to probe the whole question of communication or, more precisely, the way we put up walls and create barriers between ourselves.

As happens in this poem, Frost moves in his thinking from a basic, natural setting to an abstract consideration of human behavior. The very first word of the poem establishes the sense of that which colours its entire atmosphere. This opening line establishes a mystery; there is ‘something’ that doesn’t want the wall to be there. Whatever it is, it is a powerful force: it creates a ‘frozen grounds swell’ that attacks the wall from the base, forcing the boulders on the top to tumble off. Wintertime is when the destroyer does its work. The effect is not a small one, but a gap contrived is as wide as two people are.

The question is ‘what has caused them?’ In this stanza, he breaks from his consideration of this mysterious wall-hater for the moment to discount hunters as culprits. He knows that hunters damage walls. He has repaired the damage they have done. They cause a lot of damage to let the dogs get at rabbits that hide amongst the rocks of the wall. The hunting image becomes, however, but a dramatic aside to the main concern of the poem.

A more earthly consideration of an expression of that force which is responsible for the unexplained gaps which seasonally and mysteriously appear in the wall and await discovery in the spring with all the patience of the cosmos. We return to the air of mystery. These gaps that appear just seem to have happened, with no one seei...

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... not go behind this saying to test whether it has any validity.

Frost has tried to guide him behind it with his questioning, but to no assistance. The neighbour in fact takes pleasure in repeating this piece of derived ‘wisdom’. The poem leaves us with a somewhat comic character who like an untested saying, derived from his father, who probably derived it from his, and so on back into the ‘old-stone’ age. His neighbour ends the poem, in something of an anticlimax and wins the ‘argument’; the wall is fixed and they will meet again next year.

A strong feature of Frost’s poetry is his use of symbols. He starts a story and gathers an additional meaning and significance as the poem develops. The wall represented barriers, divisions, irrational and unnatural dividers that keep people apart, nature symbolises a unifying force, the stone-age man represent unthinking man and that civilisation has passed him by while spring symbolises a new birth in nature. Changes of seasons are important on Frosts’ poem where the neighbour rejects the chance for a new start. So as you can see this poem is just a poem about mending a wall, but it has significant meaning which relate to human behaviour.