An Analysis of Mending Wall Essay -- Mending Wall Essays

An Analysis of mend Wall The utterer of Mending Wall allies himself with the insubordinate energies of spring, which each year undo the wall separating his lieu from his neighbors Spring is the mischief in me, he says (CPPP 39). This alliance at source has the effect of setting the speaker against the basic conservatism of his neighbor beyond the hill, who as everybody knows never goes behind his fathers saying Good fences make devout neighbors. But the association of the speaker with insubordinate natural forces should not be permitted to obscure an important fact, which has been often 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 other seasons and makes repairs. So if the speaker is allied with the vernal mischief of spring and its insubordinations, he is nevertheless also set against them in his efforts to make the stones of the wall balance a nd remain in place run where you are until our backs are turned he wryly says to the stones. Here, in fact, the speaker is rather like those of Frosts earlier poems Rose Pogonias and October, each of whom, in imagery at least, attempts to arrest the naturally entropic and destructive forces of nature in the accept of achieving a momentary stay 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 the principle of Inner Form. The neighbor beyond the hill is all on the face 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 two opposed terms, for as he says in The Constant Symbol about the disciplines from within and from without He who knows not twain know s neither. Works Cited Richardson, Mark. The Ordeal of Robert Frost The Poet and his Poetics (Illinois). 1997