Hello friends, here I am writing this blog on one of the most famous poem 'Mending Wall' by Robert Frost. In this blog I try to give some information about the poem like Themes, Literary Devices, Structure, Genre.
∆ About Robert Frost :
Robert Lee Frost [1874-1963] was born in San Francisco on 26 March 1874. His parents William Prescott Frost and Isabel Moodie met when they were both working as teachers. Robert was the eldest of their two children. Jeanie was his sister.
In 1885 following the death of his father, the family moved in with his grandfather in Lawrence Massachusetts.
In 1913, Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will, was published by British publisher David Nutt. The following year Nutt also published another poetry collection by Frost titled, North of Boston.
Frost won the first of four Pulitzer Prizes in 1924 for his fourth book, New Hampshire, and followed it with West-Running Brook (1928) and A Further Range (1936), which also won a Pulitzer. He remains the only poet and one of only four persons who have won four Pulitzer Prizes. In 1960, Frost was awarded with the highest civilian award, United States Congressional Gold Medal, “In recognition of his poetry which enabled the culture of the United States and the philosophy of the world”.
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’).
• Famous works :
1. ‘Mending Wall’
2. ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
3. ‘Birches’
4. ‘Tree at my Window’
5. ‘Acquainted with the Night’
6. ‘Fire and Ice’
7. ‘Mowing’
8. ‘Desert Places’
9. ‘Christmas Trees’
10. ‘The Road Not Taken’
∆ 'Mending Wall'
∆ Analysis of the poem :
Mending Wall” is a poem by the American poet Robert Frost. It was published in 1914. The poem is set in rural New England. The poem describes how the speaker and a neighbor meet to rebuild a stone wall between their properties—a ritual repeated every spring.
Mending Wall’ principally analyses the nature of human relationships. The poem revolves around a wall, made of stones, between the two neighbours. During summers, stones from the wall fall out for some reason. Poet and his neighbour have to mend the wall each year in spring, by putting the stones back, which are quite heavy. Frustratingly, the poet suggests his neighbour to break down the wall completely, to which his neighbour does not agree, for he believes that “Good fences make good neighbours”. The poet does not understand the dark world of customs and traditions that his neighbour lives in.
The poem starts with the speaker who talks about a force that doesn’t like walls and breaks it again and again. This force causes the frozen water to swell under a wall. It also causes the wall’s upper stones to fall off its top in the warmth of the sun. It creates gaps in the wall so big that two people can walk through them shoulder-to-shoulder in the same direction.
There are the hunters who make holes in the wall but it is something different. The speaker often comes to fix those spots. The hunters haven’t left even a single stone in its place. They tried to allow the rabbits to come out that hide in the wall to make their barking dogs happy and feed them. No one has seen or heard these gaps in the wall when they are made. The speaker and other nearby people just see them there in the spring when it is time to fix the wall.
The speaker contacts his neighbor who lives on the other side of the hill. They find a spring day to meet and walk together along the wall. They start fixing these gaps as they go.
The neighbor of the speaker walks on his side of the wall while the speaker walks on his. They only fix those stones that have fallen off the wall on their side of it. Some of them look like a piece of bread and some are round in shape. They pray that they stay in their place. They also pray that they remain balanced on the top of the wall. The speaker and his neighbor keep on saying: “Don’t fall back until we’re gone from here!” Their fingers get scratches from picking up the rough stones. It’s just another outdoor activity for them. Each one of them plays this game on their side of the wall. It is nothing more.
According to the speaker, there’s no good reason for a wall to be there. On his neighbor’s side of the wall, there’s nothing but only pine trees. On the speaker’s side of the wall, there is an apple orchard. The speaker says that his apple trees are never going to cross their limit. They are not likely to cross the wall and eat his neighbor’s pine cones. He says this to his neighbor but he only responds that “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.” Since it is spring and the speaker feels prankish, he thinks if he could make his neighbor ask himself “are these walls and boundaries necessary? Isn’t that only necessary if one is trying to keep his neighbor’s cows away from his fields? There aren’t any cows here.
The speaker says that If he were to construct a wall, he would like to know what he was keeping in and what he was keeping out, and who was going to be displeased by this. Some force doesn’t love a wall. It wants to break it down. The speaker suggests that Elves are responsible for the gaps in the wall, but it’s not Elves.
The speaker wants his neighbor to find it out on his own. He sees him when he lifts stones, grasps them firmly in each of his hands. He acts like an ancient warrior. He moves in deep darkness and it is not just the darkness of the thick woods or the trees. He does not want to think otherwise about his fixed idea about the world. He likes to articulate this idea so clearly. Therefore, he says it again: “Good fences are necessary to have good neighbors.”
∆ Themes of the Poem Mending Wall :
• Emotional and Social Barriers :
The main theme of the poem mending wall is the barriers that we create to avoid interaction with other human beings, which do not benefit anyone but are rather hard to maintain, the unnecessary barriers, which restrict human beings to bond with each other, to share, care, love and communicate.
• Man and Nature :
The first few lines of the poem describes how nature is not in favour of the walls and barriers between the poet and his neighbour. The first four lines of the poem;
“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.”
• Customs and Traditions :
The only reason that we know, due to which the neighbour is not in favour of breaking down the wall, is that he believes in the saying, ‘Good fences make good neighbours’ which has been passed on to him from his father. The poet here points at the old customs and traditions that most of us blindly follow, without thinking of the consequences, without asking questions. The poet calls his neighbour ‘old-stone savage’ who lives in the dark world of his ancestors and is not ready to move on.
∆ Literary Devices Used In the Poem 'Mending Wall' :
We can see the use of symbolism, alliteration, repetition, imagery and metaphor in the poem 'Mending Wall'.
• Symbolism :
The wall itself is a symbol of gaps, distances and barriers that we create. Despite nature trying its best to bring us closer to each other and reunite us, we choose to stay away for no reason at all.
• Alliteration :
Alliteration is the repetition of the first sound of closely placed words within a single line. There are many examples of alliteration in the poem, some of which are
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
• Repetition :
The line ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’ is repeated in the poem which gives us an idea of why the neighbours so strongly believe in maintaining the fence.
• Imagery :
Poet in the poem has used imagery to appeal to the five senses and to create images in the readers’ mind. For example in the line,
“Not of woods only and the shade of trees” the poet has appealed to our sense of sight.
• Metaphor :
Metaphor is the comparison of two unlike things without using like or as. In the line, “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls” the poet has compared the heavy stones of the wall with loaves of bread balls.
∆ Genre of the Poem :
Mending wall is a narrative poem, as it tells the story about two neighbours and a wall between them which needs to be repaired every year. Like a narrative, there is a setting and there are characters in the poem.
∆ Structure of the Poem :
The poem mending wall does not follow a proper poetic form. It is a single stanza poem of forty-six lines and is written in blank verse. None of the lines rhyme with each other.
• Blank Verse :
It is a form of poetry where the lines do not rhyme and it uses iambic pentameter.
• Iambic Pentameter :
A metric scheme with five pairs of syllables per line. Each pair consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
• Word count : 1657
• Images : 7
