Bits of Life 2

M-1 Words-925

Yet another milestone in the poems galore of Robert Frost is the ever attractive and a visual poem called “The Mending Wall.

Poet's eye never misses much.

It surveys every little thing from sky to earth and records it in his mind for later contemplation and a critical conclusion.

Be it good or bad, be it nature or society, be it a king or a commoner, his sweeping eye takes in the animate and the inanimate with equal precision.

He never misses a flying eagle or a rushing wave, the sweat of a farmer or the misery of a molested woman.

The eye of a poet perceives points of prime importance. His vision is prophetic and profound. His poems mirror facts of life such as found in war and peace, the material and the metaphysical, in soul and in spirit.

The poem The Mending Wall begins on a casual note as is the case with the poems of Robert Frost.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,”
The two neighbors begin to walk the wall that needs repair. The seems to be of the opinion that there is no need to have a fence between their farms because

“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.”

But the neighbor has a different opinion regarding fences.

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

We all believe that. So why does the poet refuse the fence at least in his mind? What is this thing that doesn’t like it in place?
These are some of the questions that certainly pester us.

One of the themes underlying in the poem is human bonds. In an earlier poem called “The Tuft of Flowers” the poet shows how close bonds with a neighbor matter to him.

On a morning while on the field, he sees that a tuft of flowers were cut with a sharp scythe.
He found that he left another tall tuft without cutting. He left it to be.
The poet realizes that he feels solace in the thought that someone else too is working along side in the other farm. Thus monotony is avoided for they can be of company to one another.

“And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;”

After all no man is an island. He needs society and good fellowship. Thus the importance of human relationships matters.

“Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’”


"Mending Wall" deals with the distances and tensions between men. We clearly see that in the duo’s separate opinions regarding the fence.
The poem considers the contradictions in life and humanity, including the contradictions within each person, as man "makes boundaries and he breaks boundaries". It also examines the role of boundaries in human society, as mending the wall serves both to separate and to join the two neighbors, another contradiction.

Did the Mending Wall join them?

The poet considers the neighbor a man from dark ages or Stone Age.

“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,”

Why does the neighbor appear so ghastly to the poet?

Probably because of his fixed mindset, because he still believes in what his father might have told him.

Yet, the narrator falls in to cooperate with the neighbor because with all their differences he doesn’t want him to be distanced. The paradox is the wall he didn’t want is the one that makes them come together and work in good spirit.

The wall is also an example of metaphor in the poem, Mending Wall. The wall in the poem is a metaphor for two kinds of barriers- physical and mental.
*We keep the wall between as we go”
and cultivating relationships.

“He may not love the wall, but he actively collaborates in its preservation.”




“Mending Wall” ends on the conviction about good fences making good neighbors. ...

You know that the narrator doesn’t believe this, so why does he let it stand? asks a critic. Because some do not love walls, but others do, and always have. Hence the wall in Berlin, but also Hadrian’s Wall and the Great Wall of China.

Another interesting observation I came across during my reading of the poem is that

“But what about the breezy comparison of wall-mending to
“another kind of out-door game, /
One on a side”?

Two outdoor players with a barrier between them—this sounds a little like tennis, and Frost was a casual tennis player who used the sport in a famous metaphor about verse. The poet Rachel Hadas offers the following:

As an occasion for craft, besides being a guarantee of privacy, the wall is also crucial. Frost often compared free verse to playing tennis without the net—a remark which no one has ever interpreted as an attack on nets.

This echoes one of Frost’s own late-life comments:

I could’ve done better for them probably, for the generality, by saying

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
Something there is that does.

Why didn’t I say that? I didn’t mean that. I meant to leave that until later in the poem. I left it there.

The aging Frost also reflected, “Maybe I was both fellows in the poem.” Frost’s qualifiers—“probably,” “maybe”—make mischief all over again. So ambiguous is “Mending Wall” that it seems to play games with us.