Walking Along Frost

’s “Mending Wall” Essay, Research Paper

Walking Along Robert Frost’s “The Mending Wall”

Robert Frost was not just a writer. Frost was, more importantly, an American writer

whose works epitomized the Modernist literary movement, and in turn represented the mood

and minds of a nation. Frost remains emblematic of a specific time in our country. Through the

words of the poet, readers of his day could see a real-time reflection of themselves – visible in

Frost’s verses were the hopes and apprehensions that marked the first half of the twentieth-

century. However, in his ability to express this unlikely mixture of cynicism and sentiment,

Frost did more than capture the attention of his contemporaries he captured “the times” for all

times. A modern reader of Frost is a reader of American history; not in days and dates, but in

feeling and thought. While any of the works from Frost’s prolific collection could be used to

validate this thought, it is upon “…a road less travelled” in the lines of “The Mending Wall”

that we will venture to explore and understand the power and importance of one man’s talents.

Robert Frost was a lecturer, poet, and teacher. When he was nineteen and working in a

mill in Lawrence, Massachussetts, the Independent accepted and published “My Butterfly, an

Elegy”. This poem began Frost’s career as one of America’s great poets. Rugged New England

farm life was the inspiration for many of his poems. Like much of Frost’s poetry, “The Mending

Wall” appears on the surface to be simple and plain. However, a closer study will reveal

subtleties and depth. In the opening lines the speaker is true to this prosaic tone,

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall/That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it/And

spills the upper boulders in the sun/And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.” Upon first

examining these lines, it seems no more than a group of matter-of-fact statements pertaining to

this deteriorating stone wall. Yet, under scrutiny these lines of seeming simplicity reveal a

wealth of profundity. The “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” destroys the structure

with “frozen-ground-swell” could be construed as Nature defying the works human hands.

However, it probable that which does not “love a wall” is not simple nature, but Human Nature.

The “frozen-ground-swell” is the cold heart that permeates the building of such a wall, and the

eventual warming of the heart “spills the upper boulders in the sun”. For Frost, a man living in

a time when the industrial revolution and all the advances of the new century, the twentieth-

century, were making our fenced-in walls archaic structures in an emerging homogeneoous

society. In fact, the gaps in the wall were big enough that “…two could pass abreast.” This is

an important idea. The holes in the wall were not for one, but for two. A fence has two sides,

two identities, two purposes. In the gaping holes of the wall, both that which is restricted and

that which restricts, are allowed simultaneous freedom of movement. This is an exemplary idea

for a time when many restraints in America, socially and physically, were being defied.

Further in the poem, the speaker tells of the mending of the wall with, “And on a day we

meet to walk the line/And set the wall between us once again/We keep the wall between us as

we go/To each the boulders that have fallen to each.” The idea that this wall is in a state of

disrepair is an indication that the structure itself, the wall, is of little consequence. If any real

importance were given to the stones that make the wall, it would have been unlikely that the

speaker or the neighbor would have allowed it to become dilapidated. When the neighbors

“meet to walk the line” it is with the intention of setting the wall “between us once again”. The

tone suggests that it is a metaphorical wall that the narrator and the neighbor are setting. Each

remains on his own side, which speaks quietly of some sense of fear and selfishness as well.

Instead of helping each other on one side at a time, they stay within the confines of the wall.

Yet, there seems to be a desire to visit the very person the wall holds back, at least on the side

of the narrator, who initiates the mending of this wall in the first place. There is a fear of

solititude which decrees that they will work together, and a selfish desire not to inovlve

themselves too directly in the affairs of the other, which keeps them on their respective sides of

the wall.

In further describing the labor of mending the wall, the speaker describes the stones that

seperate narrator from neighbor, “And some are loaves and some so nearly balls/We have to

use a spell to make them balance/’Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’/We wear our

fingers rough with handling them/Oh, just another kind of out-door game,/One on a side. It

comes to little more”. Notice what the speaker says in the “spell” – “stay where you are until

our

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