Mending Wall

1. Mending Wall By: Robert Frost 1915

2. Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,That sends the frozen-ground-swell under itAnd spills the upper boulders in the sun,And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.The work of hunters is another thing: 5 I have come after them and made repairWhere they have left not one stone on a stone,But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10 But at spring mending-time we find them there.I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;And on a day we meet to walk the lineAnd set the wall between us once again.We keep the wall between us as we go. 15 To each the boulders that have fallen to each.And some are loaves and some so nearly ballsWe have to use a spell to make them balance:“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”

3. We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20 Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,One on a side. It comes to little more:There where it is we do not need the wall:He is all pine and I am apple orchard.My apple trees will never get across 25 And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonderIf I could put a notion in his head:“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 30 Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.Before I built a wall I’d ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offense.Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 35 That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d ratherHe said it for himself. I see him there,Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed. 40

4. He moves in darkness as it seems to me,Not of woods only and the shade of trees.He will not go behind his father’s saying,And he likes having thought of it so wellHe says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 45

5. A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbor’s. In spring, the two meet to walk the wall and jointly make repairs. The speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. The neighbor resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbor will not be swayed. The speaker envisions his neighbor as a holdover from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality. But the neighbor simply repeats the adage.

6. Mending Wall’s Form : Blank verse is the baseline meter of this poem, but few of the lines march along in blank verse’s characteristic lock-step iambs, five abreast. Frost maintains five stressed syllables per line, but he varies the feet extensively to sustain the natural speech-like quality of the verse. There are no stanza breaks, obvious end-rhymes, or rhyming patterns, but many of the end-words share an assonance (e.g., wall,hill,balls,wall, and wellsun,thing,stone,mean,line, and again or game,them, and him twice). Internal rhymes, too, are subtle, slanted, and conceivably coincidental. The vocabulary is all of a piece—no fancy words, all short (only one word, another, is of three syllables), all conversational—and this is perhaps why the words resonate so consummately with each other in sound and feel.

7. Most Imp. Theme: Community vs. Isolation Frost marveled at the contrast between the human capacity to connect with one another and to experience feelings of profound isolation. In several Frost poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and encounter another individual, an object, or an animal. These encounters stimulate moments of revelation in which the speaker realizes her or his connection to others or, conversely, the ways that she or he feels isolated from the community.

8. Earlier poems feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more about themselves, but these speakers ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around them, as in “The Tufts of Flowers” (1915) and “Mending Wall” (1915). Longer dramatic poems explore how people isolate themselves even within social contexts. Later poems return the focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and community only heighten loneliness and isolation. This deeply pessimistic, almost misanthropic perspective sneaks into the most cheerful of late Frost poems, including “Acquainted with the Night” and “Desert Places.”

9. Mending Wall Symbolism, Imagery: The Wall /Fences Thewall is the shining star of this poem. It unites our speaker and his neighbor, but separates them as well. As we hear the neighbor speak the proverb twice ("Good fences make good neighbors"), we start to consider all of thewall-like structures in our life: fences, gates, boundaries, lines, etc. Thewall serves as a canvas upon which a lot of complex ideas about the ways in which people, and their relationships with others, are painted and discussed.

10. Line 13: The wall is ironic because, even though it separates the speaker from his neighbor, it also brings them together every year. Line 14: "The wall" is present throughout the poem as an extended metaphor for the division that exists between the speaker and his neighbor. Line 16: "To each" is a parallelism, as its repetition emphasizes the fact that the speaker and his neighbor are on opposite side of the wall. Line 21: "Another kind of out-door game" becomes a metaphor for the wall-mending process Line: 27: The proverb "Good fences make good neighbors" is also a cliché; we hear it all the time. Line 27: The proverb "Good fences make good neighbors" is a paradox when you contrast it with the first words of the poem, "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall." In the first case, barriers are good things; in the second, they are not. Line 35: "Offence" is a pun – it sounds like "a fence."

11. Nature and Tradition Nature seems to act as the third wheel in this poem – the silent character swirling around the speaker and his neighbor. Although he doesn’t explicitly describe the landscape, we see it very clearly, and we seem to know what the seasons are like in this part of the world. Similarly, tradition seems to be the silent subject over which the speaker and his neighbor wrestle. The neighbor upholds his ancestors’ way of life, while our speaker questions this philosophy.

12. Line 5: "Hunters" are a metaphor both for the speaker and for us (the readers), all of whom try to get at something (even if we don’t know exactly what that something is). Line 25: The apple trees are momentarily personified, as the speaker claims that they will never wander across and eat the pine cones on his neighbor’s property. Line 51: The speaker uses a simile and likens his neighbor to "an old-stone savage armed," or a caveman ready for battle.

13. The wall is a metaphor of a barrier and the building of the wall is a metaphor of friendship. He and his neighbor repair the wall regularly and that is the only time they really converse. It would seem that a wall would be a barrier when in fact the wall brings the neighbors together. The line "Good fences make good neighbors" really summarizes this link

14. In 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost communicates his opinion regarding the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers, through the perspective of the narrator of the poem. Poetic techniques such as imagery, figurative language, irony, and the use of the building of a wall as a symbolic representation of barriers have been utilized to convey these messages through a light-hearted tone, and simultaneously to portray a serious side of the poem.

15. Thank YouNames in the group • Ghaida’a Haiah • Aishah Al-anssari • Alia’a Al-khathlan • Doha Dagestani • Ashwag