But we also do it an injustice if we ignore the clear ends it puts on offer, which for all we know might be enduring. I changed my mind about which Frost poem to record at the eleventh hour.We do violence to a work of art by using it for our own ends, especially for our own ideological or political ends, which are time-bound and probably transient at best. Here is my reading of “Mending Wall” which I hope I have done justice: Because the speaker who ostensibly disagrees with the neighbor’s statement continues to perpetuate its practice. If he didn’t, would the neighbor simply forget? Would the pines and the apple orchard naturally border each other in peace? We don’t know. Also, it is the speaker who always takes the effort to go to the neighbor and remind him that it’s time to mend the wall, not the other way round. And yet Frost gives his neighbor the last word. Yes, the speaker disagrees with the statement about good neighbors and presumably intends for us to disagree with it as well. And, while you are correct that the poem is oft misinterpreted, I think that part of Frost’s genius in it has been that we cannot get completely comfortable with either of the two clearest (and opposing) potential interpretations. “Mending Wall” is, to my mind, one of Frost’s two greatest works (the other being “Death of the Hired Man”). And the poem thus raises another complexity: is the wall senseless and unnecessary, or is it purposeful and good? The ominous references to the neighbor at the end of the poem (“he moves in darkness,” “old-stone savage armed”) seem to suggest that it’s probably a good thing they are separated. So, does the speaker not want the wall or does he want the wall? The poem contains evidence that he feels both ways about it. He questions it and sees no need for it, and yet he also actively engages in rebuilding the wall with his neighbor every spring - and never raises any of his questions out loud to the neighbor (and this is so, in part, because as you note, there is a figurative social boundary between them). Here, that complexity seems to be a divide in how the speaker feels about the wall. Rather, as with “Road Not Taken,” it’s simply that the ideas and feelings of the speaker are more complex than what a superficial reading of an isolated line of the poem would suggest. I’m not sure there’s any hidden meaning Frost is keeping here. Elsewhere, he was fond of very short and pithy poetic statements: see ‘Fire and Ice’ and ‘But Outer Space’, for example. Many of his poems are about the natural world, with woods and trees featuring prominently in some of his most famous and widely anthologised poems (‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘Birches’, ‘Tree at My Window’). He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language. Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. Yet it’s also worth acknowledging, as a final point of analysis, that through ‘mending wall’ so as to retain it, the speaker and his neighbour also come together: the wall brings them together as they ‘meet’ in order to mend it, but they only come together in order to reinforce the division between them. In this connection, Frost’s line, ‘We keep the wall between us as we go’ can be taken as double-edged: physically they keep to their own sides of the wall, respecting the physical boundaries between their homes, but there’s also a figurative suggestion of putting up social boundaries between them and not being entirely honest or open. In other words, it’s as if the neighbour is putting up a metaphorical ‘wall’ between him and his neighbour, refusing to share in his more relaxed and puckish attitude towards the question of the wall.įor the neighbour, the hand-me-down proverb from his father is enough wisdom for him to live by: it’s always been said, as far as he’s concerned, that ‘good fences make good neighbours’, so who is he to question such a notion? By contrast, Frost’s speaker can’t resist questioning or probing the matter. Whereas the speaker of the poem is explorative, playful, ironic, and even tongue-in-cheek (for instance, pretending that they have to cast a spell to keep some stones in place), his neighbour can only repeat the same mantra whenever the speaker asks him what the purpose of the wall is: ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ However, it’s worth stopping to consider the conversational nature of the speaker’s account of mending the wall, and the significance of the two men’s utterances in ‘Mending Wall’.
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