Mending Wall Essay

MENDING WALL

                                                                                                                        Robert Frost

            Robert Frost is the national poet of America.  Like Wordsworth, he is a poet of nature.  He is known as the poet of New England (North Eastern region on America) since many of his poems deal with the New England farmers.

            Mending Wall is one of the most widely quoted poems of Frost. It is a dramatic lyric or monologue. The speaker is the poet himself. The poem expresses the poet’s views and attitudes towards boundaries. The other character is the poet’s neighbour. He does not speak even a single word, but we come to know of his conservative views and orthodoxy, from what the poet says about him.

            The poet and his neighbour get together every spring to repair the stone wall between their respective properties. The neighbour, an old England farmer, seems to have a deep-seated faith in the value of walls and fences. He declines to explain his belief and only reiterates his father’s saying, “Good fences make good neighbours.”

            The poet remains unconvinced and asks the neighbour to look beyond the old-fashioned ideas.  His neighbour will not be moved.  The poet sees his neighbour as a person from an old era, a living example of a dark age mentality.  But the neighbour simply repeats the proverb again.

            Thus, the poem represents two opposing attitudes towards life – one is the surrender to the natural forces and the other battling with them. The poem also explores the role of boundaries in human society as the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbours..