Essay on the Defense of Walls in Mending Wall :: Mending Wall Essays

Opposing the Unthinking Defense of Walls in habitue Wall   The speaker in Mending Wall questions his neighbors stolid assumption that good fences catch up with good neighbors. Perhaps, what he objects to is non so much the sentiment itself as the unwillingness or inability of the other to think for himself, to go beyond his fathers saying. Just so we must try to get beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of Mending Wall, testing guardedly for gradations of tone as we proceed. Is it the proverb-like authority of something there is . . . that makes it so natural to equate something with the speaker? Once this equation has been made, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious something and indeed in opposing the neighbors unthinking defense of walls. Frost rings subtly drastic changes on the sound of a phrase like good fences make good neighbors. By the time the poem ends, this line has acquired some of the pat stupidity of a slogan. Similar turns of the screw affect the opening line, when to it is added the darker phrase that wants it imbibe and again when the speaker refuses to name the antiwall something. Elves is the closest he gets, yet Its not elves exactly, and Id rather / He said it for himself. Elves may mean not willowy things out of Tolkien but darker forces of the wood, for the next image is one of darkness. The neighbor is viewed as subtly menacing, an old-stone savage armed. Yet this man has been the one to defend boundaries. The apparently relaxed and leisurely gradation of the poem has made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on what side. At any rate, although the speakers ironic evasiveness undermines any confident interpretation, Poirier is surely remediate when he makes the following point . . . .it is not the neighbor . . . a man who can only dully repeat good fences make good neighbors-- . . .it is not he who initiates the fence-making. Rather it is the far more spirited, lively, and mischie vous speaker of the poem. While admitting that they do not need the wall, it is he who each year lets my neighbor get laid beyond the hill that it is time to do the job anyway, and who will go out alone to fill the gaps made in the wall by hunters.