Robert Frost's “Mending Wall“

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Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall”
Robert Frost has entertained many with his vivid portrayals of life. Frost never attended school until his family moved to New Hampshire where at age ten, he entered Lawrence High School, and would later leave as the head of his class. Frost’s legacy began in 1912 when he moved to England to devote his life to writing, and his first book was published. “Mending Wall” comes from his second book North of Boston. ““Mending Wall” is different from the other poems in North of Boston because it is opposed to visions of human existence and focuses on the psychological necessities of sustaining fictions”(Lentricchia). “Mending Wall” is one of Robert Frost’s greatest poems and has inspired many people with its views on personal boundaries and a profound togetherness.
His neighbors’ father’s clichés are what his neighbor bases his reasons upon, the reasons for the wall which separates them. One day during the spring they meet to mend the walls in which they live. Stones fall off all the time and they range in size from loaves to balls. They try not to see each other and all the neighbor says when he tells him that this is silly is “good fences make good neighbors.” He wants to ask why they make good neighbors, but knows the neighbor would not say anything but the silly saying again. He does not really know a point to the wall and does not understand what he is covering up, but as the neighbor goes away, he thinks of it again, “good fences make good neighbors!”
““Mending Wall” is a poem that distinguishes between two kinds of people: one who seizes the particular occasion of mending as fuel for the imagination and as a release from the dull ritual of work each spring and one who is trapped by work and by the New England past as it comes down to him in the form of his father’s clichés” (Lentricchia). This explains the lives of the two men involved in ...