Ryan Gunn
ENGL-2604
Dennis Welch
Final Exam Revision
5/4/11
The Removal of Barriers in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” – Robert Frost
“Mending Wall,” a poem by Robert Frost, depicts two neighbors rebuilding a
wall that divides their properties. The speaker of the poem questions the need for a
wall in the first place, while his brutish neighbor maintains that “good fences make
good neighbors” (27). Through the use of simple, often monosyllabic, language and a
speech-like rhythmic structure that deviates slightly from his typical iambic
pentameter, Frost maintains a conversational tone throughout the poem. These
formal features create a very natural sounding voice for the speaker and thus
connect him with nature in a way that his neighbor is not. In the opening line
“something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the word “something” refers to nature.
The speaker’s ability to recognize this immediately alerts us to his connection with
nature and sparks the conflict with the neighbor over the necessity of the barrier
between them. In “Mending Wall,” Frost argues for the removal of boundaries,
literal, figurative and psychological, by addressing the segregation of these
neighbors, the futility of maintaining boundaries, and humanity’s sometimes blind
adherence to tradition.
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For a metaphor on the conflict between neighbors, Frost uses the situation of
two men getting together each spring to maintain the boundary between them.
Sally Merry speaks on Frost’s metaphor, stating that humanity has “schizophrenic
views of separation and community. They seem to want the close ties of a cozy
neighborhood as well as the ability to assert their rights [to privacy]” (71). The
speaker perfectly represents the seemingly paradoxical viewpoints that Merry
suggests. He consistently questions the need for the wall, stating, “There where it is
we do not need the wall: He is all pine and I am apple orchard./My apple trees will
never get across/And eat the cones under his pines” (23-26) but in lines 11-12 when
he says, “But at spring mending-time we find them[holes in the wall] there./I let my
neighbor know beyond the hill,” we discover that the speaker is the one that calls
the meeting to rebuild. While the wall separates the two men, it also brings them
together at least once a year, a communion that may not have happened without
the desire to rebuild the wall. Frost, through his character’s inconsistency, is
imploring his readers to succeed where the speaker fails and allow the barriers of
our own lives to crumble.
Earlier the persona is also depicted patching up the wall without his
neighbor. Despite his admonishments of his neighbor’s view, the speaker rebuilds
the wall after the swelling ground spills the boulders. However, the speaker once
again shows his connection to nature when he talks about “the work of hunters
[being] another thing” (5). Charles Watson notes that the speaker’s phrase “another
thing” shows that he sees “what hunters and dogs do to walls [as] fundamentally
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different from what the frozen ground swell does to them.” (655) Rather than gently
spill boulders, the hunters crash through the wall without regard for its destruction.
Watson equates this invasion to rape. However, once again showing inconsistency,
the speaker follows up after both nature and the hunters to repair the wall.
One of the main themes in Frost’s poetry is the on-going conflict between
man and nature. “Mending Wall” is no exception. The speaker begins with the line,
“something there is that doesn't love a wall,” and continues through the first eleven
lines to describe the different ways in which the wall is destroyed throughout the
course of a year. Later the speaker even conjectures that it may be “elves” tearing
down the wall, but to Frost that “something” is nature. The two men engage in a
Sisyphean battle against nature’s will. Recreating the Sisyphus myth, Frost
replaces the Corinthian king with two neighbors and the mountain with a wall
dividing their properties in order to exposes the futility of the men’s actions.
The speaker’s descriptions of the neighbor continuously disassociate him with
nature. In lines 42-43 the persona describes his neighbor as “[moving] in
darkness…not of woods only and the shade of trees”. The neighbor has a dark aura
about him that keeps him in a shadow that the speaker sees as unnatural and
possibly evil. In the next lines the persona condemns his neighbor’s repetition of the
proverb “good fences make good neighbors” by stating “he[the neighbor] likes having
thought of it so well” (45). However in line 44 we learn that the phrase is the
neighbor’s father’s old saying. By sarcastically claiming that the neighbor “like
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having thought of it,” the persona characterizes the neighbor as unoriginal and
inorganic.
Allan Douglas Burns identifies the wall as a metaphor on natures
antagonism of the characters: “The way that the wall, an imposition of human will
and order, stands in opposition to natural forces that tend toward entropy and
decay represents an instance of one of Frost’s favorite themes: the ultimately futile
struggle of humans against nature” (219). The persona states that he and his
neighbor have to resort to magic, using “a spell to make them[the boulders] balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'” (19-20). His words imply that even
the characters know the futility of their actions. However, through the annual
nature of their meetings, Frost shows that the two neighbors are stubborn enough
to continue their futile work. The use of magic also suggests that the wall between
them is just as much a mental construction as a physical one. To the neighbor, the
knowledge that someone is not invading his privacy is comforting, and thus, the
physical barrier needs to be maintained to keep the mental construction intact.
Another argument that Frost makes is for the breaking of traditions—also
mental constructions—which are barriers that confine us from liberal thinking and
new experiences. The speaker’s neighbor represents this adamant upholding of
tradition that Frost’s speaker tries to persuade us away form. In the last section of
the poem, the persona describes the neighbor as, “bringing a stone grasped firmly
by the top/In each hand, like an old-stone savage man” (40-41). Talking about the
barriers that the wall represents, Rebecca Pelan suggests that the building of such
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barriers is “primitive, selfish, counterproductive behavior” (81). This brutish
description suggests that the views represented by the neighbor are out-dated and
need to be replaced.
Louis Untermeyer, suggests that on a purely thematic level, “Mending Wall”
is about “the clash of two forces: the spirit of revolt, which challenges tradition, and
the spirit of restraint, which insists that traditions must be upheld, built up, and
continuously rebuilt, as a matter of principle” (111). The speaker, who represents a
subdued and conflicted version of the spirit of revolt, questions even the traditions
he upholds, an action Frost wishes for all of his readers. The neighbor’s “thoughtless
adherence to cultural traditions” (219) and primeval appearance serves to warn
readers away from such philosophies.
However, Frost also cautions against taking the speakers perspective. The
speaker does not take the rebuilding of the wall, or its implications, seriously,
equating it to a friendly tennis match: “Oh, just another kind of out-door game,/One
on a side. It comes down to little more.” The speaker’s apathy on the situation leads
to his contradictory actions regarding his desire for the wall.
While Frost makes the argument to let barriers crumble, he purposefully
made his speaker a concessive enforcer of this argument. This is because Frost
knows that a life devoid of boundaries is too much freedom, and would lead to a
shapeless existence. Instead he suggests that we break down our own barriers, but
with a logical discretion.
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Bibliography
Burns, Allan. Thematic Guide to American Poetry. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.
Frost, Robert. The Road Not Taken: A Selection of Robert Frost’s Poems. New York,
NY: MacMillan, 2002.
Homer. The Odyssey. xi. 593 Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Viking, 1996.
Merry, Sally. “Mending Walls and Building Fences: Constructing the Private
Neighborhood.” Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 33, (1993):
(71-90)
Pelan, Rebecca. Two Irelands: Literary Feminisms North and South. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 2005.
Charles N. Watson, Jr. Frost's Wall: The View from the Other Side. The New
England Quarterly 44, No. 4 (1971): pp. 653-656
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