Robert Frost Personal Boundaries

Personal boundaries are an essential component of every relationship: marriage, friendship, family, professional, and even neighbors. Robert Frost makes validates this notion in “Mending Wall,” a poem where the speaker’s animosity toward his neighbor tempts him to challenge whether the neighbor’s wall is necessary between their properties. Combined with the Charles N. Watson Jr.’s “Frost’s Wall: The View from the Other Side,” a literary criticism, the two authors make the following arguments: personal boundaries are necessary, some people will resent personal boundaries of others, and some will attempt to infringe on those personal boundaries. Boundaries are necessary to protect one’s self and their individuality. Throughout the poem, “the

Boundaries should benefit the individual encountering them as much as the person who establishes and upholds them. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case for the speaker. He cannot fathom the distancing, the distinct separation, between his neighbor and himself. “The wall may be a barrier to friendship and communication, but it is also a protector of privacy- a protector even of the integrity of the self against the world’s efforts to use that private self for its own ends and ultimately to twist it out of shape”

The speaker goes on to call his neighbor “an old-stone savage…[who] moves in darkness as it seems to him” (line 40-41). It can make some feel inadequate, even hateful that they cannot use, injure, or manipulate another to achieve their own satisfaction. Regrettably, some believe they need this just to feel in control and relevant in their own lives. Consequently, when anyone is met with rejection, or after they have succeeded in their quest, they will undoubtedly reveal their true nature. “The speaker’s blindness to the meaning of his own words and actions comes to a [] focus, where the façade of genial tolerance drops to reveal his real antagonism toward any beliefs he cannot understand” (655). He retaliates through cutting remarks and a desire to destroy the wall. “The speaker[] [exhibits] a blindness both to the attractions of his neighbor’s attitude and to the limitations of his own” (654). It will happen, even by those who often respect others for the sake of respect itself: someone will attempt to infringe upon those personal boundaries. And eat the cones under his pines, I tell