Rotation 3 Blog 3

Rotation 3

Blog 3

Poem 1

Mending Wall By Robert Frost

The poem is written in a conversational tone as if the poet is speaking to he reader. There is no rhyme or rhythm. The words are easy to understand, but they contain many images. It is written in almost a prose form, with sentences ending in the middle of a line.

The speaker sets out to do a routine farming procedure, replacing stones along a fence separating his neighbor’s orchard from his. However, Frost takes an everyday subject and asks a deeper question, searching for a deeper meaning. He signals that at the beginning of the poem when he says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He makes a simple explanation for the damage to the wall— “frozen ground swell,” “hunters,” etc.— but he implies that there is a spiritual force that doesn’t like walls so it tears them down. He goes on to tell of his mending chore with his neighbor. They walk the line together but “ keep the wall between us as we go.” Here Frost implies that they rarely meet and only to complete this task: “and set the wall between us once again.” He compares the repair to an outdoor game, one on a side, not a team, an image that underlines their separateness. Although there is really no need for a wall, his neighbor insists, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost expresses his desire to change his circumstances because he sees walls as bad things “what I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.” When he repeats the phrase “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” Frost actually refers to himself. He compares his neighbor to an “old-stone savage armed.” His purpose, like the savages, was to keep the enemies out. When he says that his neighbor “moves in darkness as it seems to me” Frost suggests the neighbor’s blindness of purpose. Instead of warming to his neighbors and trying to communicate ad become friendly, he is stuck in the past: he will not go behind his fathers saying he clings to tradition.