A Time to Mend: Analysis of Robert Frost's "Mending Wall" (with full paraphrase)
...e line “There where it is we do not need the wall.” In the course of completing his chore, the speaker begins to ponder what the wall signifies. This third section is the philosophical peak of the poem. The first person pronouns become less abundant as subjects; rather, the speaker introduces somewhat strange new subjects, from “trees” to “Spring” to “cows” as he asks hypothetical questions and tries to determine why he even has a wall in the first place. The speaker becomes noticeably more excited; his mind races as he contemplates the meaning of his wall and walls in general. The speaker then abruptly stops, and returns to his opening statement, with a new clause attached: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, That wants it down.” This statement, the indicator of the fourth section of the poem, is in many ways the furthest logical extension of his musings on walls, although it is completely vague. The speaker himself cannot even accurately express his perception of this near-divine force. He tries to attribute the situation to “elves,” referring back to the earlier notions of the supernatural, but immediately decides that “elves” does not really express the phenomenon he is attempting to describe. The fifth section of the poem is easy to recognize, as it takes an entirely different focus and tone. The last several lines of the poem are entirely devoted to describing the neighbor. The language is more ornate and poetic sounding, with references to an “old-stone savage armed” and “move[ments] in darkness.” The meaning of this final section could have several interpretations. Taken most literally, it could merely mean that the neighbor prefers the idea of the fence, and with that the speaker’s train of thought comes to a halt. However, a closer look at these closing lines reveals a sharp criticism of all of human society. The neighbor seems to be the everyman, content in following his father’s traditions, even without reason. He builds up his walls and spends precious time year after year attending to them, when in reality they serve no purpose whatsoever. Frost paints a picture of this type of person as outdated, even Neanderthalic. The lines “He moves in darkness as it seems to me, Not of woods only and the shade of trees.” Is a clever play on words, that ties together all of the various levels of metaphor in this poem. The neighbor walks in the shadow of the trees as he mends his wall, but he is also “in the dark” intellectually; there is no logic to his actions, yet he is not even remotely open to suggestions of change. Furthermore, humans in general, show themselves not to be the great intellectual beings they sometimes claim to be, when they become fixed in their habits and their actions ultimately lose all meaning. The poem ends on an ironic note: Frost has just revealed the neighbor to be the intellectual equivalent of a cave man, a mental midget who waives his own autonomy in favor of the comfort and convenience of routine. Yet the neighbor, amused by what he perceives to be a clever retort, repeats himself once more: “Good fences make good neighbors.” Frost paints what I feel is a strikingly accurate picture of human nature in a poem driven by his command of the language. His usage of various agents and types of action serve as indicators of the individual sections of the poem, each of which move the reader one step further along from what begins as a poem about an ordinary chore, to a well-reasoned critique of human nature. Paraphrase There is something in our world that detests walls. It pushes the frozen ground up under my wall, knocking the upper boulders off and into the fields, and creates gaps several feet wide. Hunters, too, damage my wall, turning over stone after stone in search of a rabbit to appease th...