MENDING WALL - Robert Frost

 MENDING WALL - Robert Frost

Mending wall, is one of the most widely quoted poems of Robert frost, published in 1914. It is a lyric in the form of dramatic monologue. The speaker in the poem is a young man, presumably the poet himself. The lyric is an expression of his views and attitudes. The other character in the poem is the poet's neighbour, an old farmer. He does not speak even a single word, but we know of his views and attitudes, of his conservation and orthodoxy, from what speaker 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 New 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". But the speaker is of the opposite opinion. As he points out:

                                There where it is we do not need the wall;

                                He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

To him the neighbour's adherence to his father's saying suggests the narrowness and ignorance of the primitive:

                                He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

                                Not of woods only and shade of trees.

Yet the speaker's own attitude is also enigmatic and in some respects primitive. He seems to be in sympathy with some elemental spirit in nature, which denies all boundaries. It is suggested that there is some supernatural power at work in Nature that is always against all fences and walls,

                                Something three is that doesn't love the 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….

                                It might be some mysterious fairy:

                                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.

The poem portrays a clash between these two points of view, and it may, therefore, seem that its meaning Is the solution. Frost offers to the conflict. The poem leads one to ask, which of the two is right. The speaker or his Yankee neighbour? Should man tear down the barriers which isolate individuals from one another., or should he recognise the distinction and limits are necessary for human life? "Frost does not provide an answer, and the attempt to wrest one from his casual details and enigmatic comments would falsify us a lesson in human relations." Though the poem presents the speaker's attitude more sympathetically than the neighbour's, it does not offer this as the total meaning. Frost's intention is to portray a problem and explore the many different and paradoxical issues it involves. He pictures it within an incident from rural life, and in order to reveal its complex nature he develops it thorough the conflict of two opposed points of view.

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