An Analysis of Mending Wall Essay -- Mending Wall Essays

An outline of Mending Wall The utterer of Mending Wall allies himself with the ungovernable energies of spring, which yearly destroy the palisade separating his property from his neighbors Spring is the mischief in me, he says (CPPP 39). This alliance at first has the effect of setting the loudspeaker against the basic conservatism of his neighbor beyond the hill, who as everybody knows never goes idler his fathers saying Good fences make good neighbors. But the association of the speaker with insubordinate natural forces should not be permitted to obscure an important fact, which has been a lot enough noticed he, not the neighbor, initiates the yearly spring repair of the wall moreover, it is again he, not the neighbor, who goes behind hunters who destroy the wall in early(a) seasons and makes repairs. So if the speaker is allied with the vernal mischief of spring and its insubordinations, he is nevertheless to a fault set against them in his efforts to make the stones of the wall dimension and remain in place Stay w here you are until our backs are false he wryly says to the stones. Here, in fact, the speaker is rather like those of halts earlier poems Rose Pogonias and October, each of whom, in imagination at to the lowest degree, attempts to arrest the course entropic and destructive forces of nature in the hope of achieving a momentary blockage against confusion. In Rose Pogonias, for example, we read We ... ...rically and thematically balanced . We might also regard Mending Wall in light of what Frost says in his 1934 letter to his daughter Lesley about(predicate) the doctrine of Inner Form. The neighbor beyond the hill is all on the side of conformity, the speaker of the poem (at least by his own account) all on the side of formity. Frost himselfand here we should perhaps distinguish him from his speakerstands at the dialectical intersection of these dickens opposed terms, for as he says in The Constant Symbol about the disciplines fr om within and from without He who knows not both knows neither. Works Cited Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost The Poet and his Poetics (Illinois). 1997