Assignment Paper:-E.C 303 American Literature
Topic:-‘Mending Wall’
Name: - Saiyad Nargis I.
Roll No:-14
Semester: - 1
Batch:-2011-12
Submitted to,
Dr. Dilip Barad
Dept. of English
Bhavnagar
Poet - Robert Frost
Poem - ‘Mending Wall’
Period of life - 1874-1963
About Poet- Robert Frost Lee was born in San Francisco California Lawrence England
Frost’s poems- i. ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’,
ii. ‘Birches’,
iii. ‘Putting in the Seed’,
iv. ‘Snow’,
v. ‘A Time to Talk’,
vi. ‘The Road not Taken’,
vii. ‘Mending Wall’ etc….
We will evaluate the characteristics of his poems.
Characteristics of his poems- We can see the influence of his life in his poetry. There is nothing complicated about his use of the structure in his poems but we can interpret the words in different ways. Frost’s poetry is the link between the American poetry of 19th century and 20th century.
Theme of ‘Mending Wall’- The poet tells about the stone wall that the poet doesn’t want to keep but his neighbour wants to mend it. This wall was between their houses that separates their houses.
As shown by P.K.Thakar, we can interpret this poem in three levels.
vPhonological level,
vMeaning level,
vStructural level
vPhonological level-
This is a level of sound. The poet has used the lexical category of alliteration. The words ‘there’ and ‘that’, ‘sends’ and ‘swell’, ‘spills’ and ‘sun’, ‘have’ and ‘hiding’, ‘then’ and ‘them’, ‘we’ and ‘walk’, ‘us’ and ‘again’, ‘some’ and ‘saw’, ‘we’ and ‘wear’, ‘apple’ and ‘across’, ‘mischief’ and ‘me’, ‘his’ and ‘head’, ‘what’, ‘was’ and ‘walling’, ‘elves’ and ‘exactly’, ‘he’, ‘himself’ and ‘having’, ‘he’ and ‘having’ alliterate each other.
vMeaning level-
“SOMETHING there is that doesn’t love a wall”
This is a first line of the poem in which the poet says that there is something that doesn’t like a wall. The speaker doesn’t like a wall. His neighbour tries to mend the wall but the poet asks him why he is doing so, there is no need for a wall but the neighbour was a determined person and he resorts to an old adage:
“Good fences make good neighbours”.
If we read this poem more and more, we interpret the poem in a different way. We can see the simple poem in a different way. We can see the simple poem tells something more than its literary meaning. What does the poem really wants to convey through the boundary? , Who is the real wall-maker, his neighbour or he himself?
Like Frost’s other poems, this poem also starts with simply traditional way but it becomes more and more complex. In this poem, the speaker may dislike the activity of his neighbour of mending wall but actually he goes to see the wall once in a year and only to see the damage done by hunters because at that time hunters following the rabbits damaged the wall many a time. This line presents that reference,
“The work of hunters is another thing;”
It shows that one man looks at his relation after it was torn out.
The poem shows the unconsciousness of his neighbour. By mending the wall, the neighbour wants to fill the gap between human beings.
In the poem it is asked, Where is the wall; in between their houses or in between their hearts?
The poet remembers that one friend of the poet was punished to recite the poem for some mischief but at the same time, he says that it was a real poem but no-one should force to recite because it will make it loose its charm.
This poem also reminds a story from Greek mythology in which Sisyphus is condemned to push a boulder up a hill but he fails many a time and of course it was a useless task. Just like that, both of the men push boulder at the top of the wall but it rolls down.
All the poems of Frost start with the simple straightforward way but slowly and steadily at the end, the poems become complex one.
Wall-building is one of the ritual terms. Rules and regulations are the walls. These rules show the human-nature. The wall building is a social activity. So, if we look at something as a barrier, may be it is a good sign of our development.
In many of his poems, there is a characteristic of creative process. ‘Mending Wall’ is no exceptional to it. Creativity is a good act. Even destruction is a creation, how? We can say that if something is destroyed, another new creative thing would be made but yes, it is that if something is destroyed, it looses its real identity.
In the poem, the speaker sees no reason to have a wall. He says that there are no cows and only apple and pine tree. This can be understood by these lines,
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across.”
The speaker believes that it is his neighbour’s old mind-set and he tells him to remove the old-fashioned folly but the neighbour doesn’t understand this and sticks to the old adage and the line,
“Good fences make good neighbours.”
comes twice in the poem. It shows the importance of the line in this poem. It shows the need of boundary in the life of men. If barrier would come, a man would automatically make or create another thing. Barrier is an encourageous thing, it gives the freedom and it offers the productivity, it is really a challenging. Frost didn’t like to write in a free verse. So, he wrote all things of writing in considering the rules and regulations of the verse and it helped him to make a good verse. Thus, in the poem, the poem becomes complex when we try to understand who is the mender and who is the breaker.
vStructural level-
Structural level shows the level of grammar used in the structure of the poem.
This is a long poem. The line,
“Good fences make good neighbours”
comes twice in the poem. It shows that the device of repetition is used. The words like ‘it’, ‘and’, ‘the’, ‘he’, ‘I’, ‘him’, ‘was’, ‘wall’ are repeated in the poem.
The poet has used baseless metre, blank verse while writing the poem. The poet has used five stressed words in the poem. There is an internal rhyming scheme in the worlds like ‘wall’ and ‘balls’, ‘thing’ and ‘mean’ etc…There is no any fancy word is used except ‘another’.
The views of others-ü George Montiero-
George Montiero says that walls and fences are really instrumental in the renewal of human relationship or not, is a question. The poet doesn’t clarify it. For the speaker, a neighbour is
“like an old stone savage”
He remembers the tradition of the Rome
He remembers H.D.Thereau, who asked,
“Who are bad neighbours?”
He says the bad neighbours are those who let the cattle to enter the house because they don’t wan to make them angry. H.D.Thereau again asked,
“Who are good neighbours?”
One can now easily answer that those who make a wall or distance and don’t let their cattle come or go are good neighbours. These all is written in his ‘Unlinked Myth in Frost’s ‘Mending Wall’’.
ü Frank Lentricchia-
Frank Lentricchia’s ‘Robert Frost: Modern Poetic and the Landscapes of self’ gives his view about ‘Mending Wall’.
He says that ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘The Black Cottage’ and ‘A Servant to Servant’ deals with hysteria and ‘Mending Wall’ is opposed to human existence. It is an opening poem of his second volume ‘North of Boston’.
He says that Frost has used his imagination interestingly in the poem. There is a line.
“that doesn’t love a wall”
In this line, he doesn’t clarify that it is frost and this way, he makes fun. The play of mature man is grounded ironically.
He gives the example of the selves dramatized, ‘Going For Water’, ‘The Tulf of Flowers’. In which the character doesn’t like to be alone in his imaginative journey. ‘Mending Wall’ is a political allegory. There is one man who wants to be free from ritual work and there is another one who wants to tie his father’s words. He remembers the theory of Kant. The difference between the two is that one lives in a freedom, in his imagination and the other who is unaware of the imagination.
He remembers Schiller who distinguishes the civilized man from close minded men.
ü John C. Kemp-
John C. Kemp has given a very minute description of this poem in his ‘Robert Frost and Ne England: The Poet as Regionalist’.
He concentrates on the beginning, conflict, structure etc…At the beginning, persona talks with himself, talks about the wall. Frost uses informal language. The three active verbs ‘sends’, ‘spills’, ‘makes’ suggest his close observation of the destruction. The first line of the poem is very significant and the apothegm comes twice in a poem, once in the middle and at the last. The farmer is sticked to his apothegm and doesn’t escape. Frost shows the seriousness of wall-building. The allusion ‘out-door game’ evokes competition. The competition, not only in repairing but also in destructing. If the wall-builders will play the game together, they will play against wall-builders, too.
Frost has used very fanciful fabrication like,
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard”
In the poem, the farmer speaks less but his adage speaks a lot. It is a memorable line. It has truth. The poem is full of irony.
“an old stone savage”
has ironic tone. The speaker thinks that they are making a wall but the Yankee farmer thinks that it is only fence-mending. The farmer doesn’t explain his thought and thinks that the communication would not be successful. Here, fences are good so, it should also be in relation. It means unnecessary close-up between the two neighbours is undesirable.
In the end, the poet doesn’t clarify who was right and who was wrong.
Conclusion- Thus, in the poem, Frost’s style and the way of writing is clearly shown. We can see this in the views of John C. Kemp, Frank Lentricchia, George Montiero etc… ‘Mending Wall’ represents the different mind-set of the people. It shows the reality. It is not a poem of only the process of mending a wall but it tells something more. Frost takes us in the imagination in flight.
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