Do Good Fences Do Really Make Good Neighbors?

657 Words3 Pages
In his poem 'Mending Wall', Robert Frost presents to us the ideas of barriers between people, communication, friendship and the sense of security people gain from barriers. His messages are conveyed using poetic techniques such as imagery, structure and humor, revealing a complex side of the poem as well as achieving an overall light-hearted effect. Robert Frost has ingeniously intertwined both a literal and metaphoric meaning into the poem, using the mending of a tangible wall as a symbolic representation of the barriers that separate the neighbors in their friendship. The theme of the poem is about two neighbors who disagree over the need for a wall to separate their properties. Not only does the wall act as a divider in separating estates, but also acts as a barrier in the neighbors’ friendship, thus separating them. Frost, the poet speaker, is the observant and enlightened neighbor. Every spring he realizes that both nature represented by the melting of snow and man represented by the hunters together contribute to making gaps in the wall. A combination of logical reasoning in which the apple trees grow in his plot of land and pine trees in his neighbor's, and intuition "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" convince him of the futility of this annual ritual of trying to 'mend' this particular wall. But at the same time he is a perceptive person who knows when to build and when not to build a wall: “But here there are no cows...to give offence." To him, the mending of the wall is just a burden that he wishes not to have to deal. In direct contrast, contrary to his neighbor is a conservative who will not listen to reason and is of course completely immune to any sudden flash of intuition. All that he can do is merely repeat parrot like "Good fences make good neighbors." He is a prisoner of dogmatic traditionalism whose thought process and actions are
Open Document