Summary on mending wall by Robert Frost
Answers
Answer:
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“Mending Wall” is a meditation told from the perspective of a landowner who joins his neighbor in repairing the stone wall that divides their properties. As the speaker notes in the opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” He notes the different forces at work against the wall, including the “frozen-ground-swell” that surges upward, scattering the stones from below, as well as hunters who strip away the stones to draw rabbits out of hiding.
As a result, every spring brings “mending-time,” and so the speaker calls on his neighbor and they meet to mend the wall. They walk along the wall, each man on his own side, fixing the broken spots as they go. They raise the fallen stones, some like bread loves and others like spheres that wobble and threaten to fall.
The speaker then makes an observation: his neighbor’s lot contains only pine trees; his own, only apple orchards. The wall is thus unnecessary, for there are no animals to contain or keep out. When the speaker mentions this fact, his neighbor simply replies, “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
Filled with the mischief of springtime, the speaker persists. Noting again the wall’s uselessness, the speaker says, “‘Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out.’” When the speaker repeats the dictum of the opening line, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it seems that the speaker himself is an agent of that “something.”
The neighbor raises a stone in both hands, “like an old stone-savage armed”; to the speaker’s eye, “he moves in darkness.” Finally, the neighbor responds to the speaker’s objections, deferring again to his beloved saying, passed down from his father: “‘Good fences make good neighbors.’”
Analysis
Frost penned “Mending Wall” in blank verse—unrhymed iambic pentameter—without stanza breaks. Frost favored this form, using it in other well-known lyrics such as “Birches” and “Out, Out—”. The form lends itself to a combination of narrative and meditation. “Mending Wall” describes the story of two landowners mending the wall that runs between their properties, but under the surface of the story, the speaker is busy investigating why the wall is broken and whether and why it ought to be mended.
The first word of Frost’s poem introduces a mystery to be solved. The “something” that “doesn’t love a wall” is both ambiguous and impersonal. In the broadest sense, that “something” is entropy: natural and human forces with no regard for the wall’s integrity. As the poem unfolds and the speaker begins to engage his neighbor on the question of the wall’s necessity, it becomes clear that the speaker himself is an agent of these entropic forces, a vessel for the “something… that doesn’t love a wall.” The speaker acknowledges this truth, claiming that “spring is the mischief in me,” before questioning his neighbor’s dogmatic adage, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
In the final lines of the poem, the speaker glimpses another force at play, one which lends the wall its reason for being and validates the neighbor’s favorite saying. The speaker sees the neighbor hoist a stone, seeming to wield it as if he were “an old-stone savage armed.” There is a veiled, latent brutality in the neighbor that the speaker sees as “darkness… / Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” In the light of this vision, the wall—and the other conventions of civilization—seems a necessary measure to place against the savage potential of humanity. By the end of the poem, it is unclear whether the neighbor is conscious of this inner darkness that lends credence to his father’s adage. Either way, he repeats it with relish.
Answer:
Frost uses blank verse for the form of the poem. Blank verse is unrhymed and mostly employs iambic pentameter, five feet per line, to drive the narrative:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
Sometimes trochaic meter is used but usually iambs rule within the ten syllables per line, which keeps the wall intact but leaves room for modification. However, lack of end-rhyme in blank verse denies the purely lyrical so the poet is certain that all 45 lines will have an individual sound.
Frost's genius lies in his diction and delivery - he's colloquial yet profound, and there are lines here that stay in the memory because they have a certain rhythm and music. They tempt the mind and please the voice.
As the poem progresses the differences between the two become more marked. By line 14 the two neighbors are walking either side of the wall, picking up and replacing various shaped boulders until they reach some trees where there might not be a need for a wall.
The speaker goads the other protagonist. This is Frost the poet spicing things up with mischief and fun by suggesting this annual, seasonal walk is nothing more than a game, that one neighbor is all pine and the other an apple orchard.
Tension becomes apparent as soon as the line Good fences make good neighbors appears, for it is this reply that sparks the speaker's need to know why a wall (a fence) can make somebody good.
We're approaching moral territory here and in lines 32/33/34 an interesting issue arises:
When a wall is built, something is walled in and something is walled out. It becomes easier to offend someone so it's best to know beforehand just exactly why a wall needs to be constructed. Little wonder President Kennedy used Frost's lines when speaking at the Berlin Wall in the 1960s.
'I am both wall builder and wall destroyer,' Frost wrote to his friend Charles Foster. Meaning? As a poet words are used to build up something solid and hopefully enduring whilst at the same time a poet needs to break down walls that are no longer needed and are in fact obstacles to progress.
Further Analysis
Just what is it that doesn't love a wall? In this cold, rural setting common sense shows us that swollen ground upsets the stone formation; Nature herself knows no boundaries. Tree roots, hunters and dogs, even Elves, may be responsible for other gaps in the wall.
The speaker taunts and teases but it's more an internal mind game - there is no real, open dialogue or debate about the necessity of a wall. But there is the feeling that the speaker could well exist without a wall, whilst the entrenched neighbor relies on ancestral/patriarchal ties to maintain the solid barrier of stone.
So as we near the end of the poem the scene becomes one of observer and observed. The traditionalist is now
............like an old-stone savage armed.
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.
There are subtle variations on a monologue. The speaker is trying to convey the idea that there's this thick-skinned male he shares a boundary with, whose very identity is dependent on the wall being repaired so as to ensure continuity.
Despite the gap between speaker and neighbor, in the end the wall gets mended.