Mending Wall

1 Pages 181 Words

There is a lot happening in Robert Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall” (1914) and as a result, there can be many different valid interpretations of the poem. The time period in which it was written, the form, and the content all correspond to each other in very important ways. These three factors lead me to believe that the poem is much more then just a commentary on one man’s feelings about repairing an old wall. The year 1914 is, in my opinion, the most important outside factor when discussing the work. The obvious reason being that it was a very pivotal year in World War I, but it was also a time when Women’s Rights were being debated, and it was not so long after the end of the Civil War. That being said, the issues that those facts bring to mind – destruction/death on a large scale, feminism/challenging tradition, slavery/racism – play important roles in what the overall message of the poem is. “Mending Wall”, in my opinion, is a poem that challenges old values and ideas of the status quo....