Mending Wall by Robert Frost - Poetry: The Best Words in the Best Order - #BlogchatterA2ZChallenge2021

 MENDING WALL 

ROBERT FROST

                                                               Scholars' Park

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.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where 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,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

                                                               Pen and the Pad

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To catch the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door 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

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 wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What 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,

That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,'

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He 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.

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 well

He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors'. 

                                                                    Aphrodite's Vision

The Poet: Robert Frost (1874 -1963)

Robert Frost has the distinction of being known as one of America's "public literary figures, almost an artistic institution". He won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and his poems are quoted across the world as axioms. He mostly wrote on rural themes in New England, and his poems reveal deep philosophical and social insights though couched in deceptively simple language. His poem - 'The Road Not Taken' - has influenced a number of people on the choices to be taken in life. 'Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening' had the famous lines - 

      The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Fuel Running

'Mending Wall' talks about how men build walls or barriers between them, walls that are not required. Nature herself does not love a wall. Often these walls crumble naturally or when hunters force their way through to flush out rabbits. The poet does not approve of a wall, but ironically, in spring time, he helps his dour neighbor to mend the wall. 

Jocularly, he tells his neighbor, who reminds him of an ancient caveman carrying a stone in each hand, that his apple trees will never get across and eat the pine cones in his neighbor's field.

The neighbor only replies, "Good fences make good neighbors." The poet wonders what it is that he is walling in, or walling out. 

 

Slide Player

                                                                          Slide Player

Two points of view come out clearly in the poem. The poet argues that walls should not exist because they create barriers between people, and nations across the world.

The neighbor replies that walls are required to maintain harmonious relationships because they prevent conflict and aggression. Two interesting points of view, indeed!

                                                                            Biography

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