The air is cool and crisp. Roosters can be heard welcoming the sun to a new day and a woman is seen, wearing a clean colorful wrap about her body and head, her shadow casting a lone silhouette on the stone wall. The woman leans over to slide a piece of paper into one of the cracks, hoping her prayer will be heard in this city of Jerusalem. Millions are inserting their prayers into the walls of Japanese temples, while an inmate in one of a hundred prisons across the United States looks past his wall toward the prayers he did not keep. Billions fall asleep each night surrounded by four walls and thousands travel to China to witness the grandest one of all. Who builds walls and who tears them down?
The “Mending Wall” is the opening poem in Robert Frost’s second book entitled, North of Boston. The poem portrays the casual part of life as seen by two farmers mending their wall. A great number of people might look at “Mending Wall” and see a simple poem about a simple aspect of life. If this is truly the case then why are so many drawn to the poem and what is found when more than a superficial look is spent on Robert Frost’s work? The “Mending Wall” is an insightful look at social interactions as seen in the co
mparison of the repeated phrases and the traditional attitudes of the two farmers.
perspectives of these farmers. Notice how the speaker has never identified what does not love a wall. The speaker is intelligent enough to understand the mechanics of a wall falling apart during the winter. He blames it upon the cold ravages of a winter swell and the indifferent attitude of hunters searching out a hare. By leaving the question a mystery the speaker is able to entertain himself with fantasies of elves and ideas of fiction, to fill a winter’s long mind made mischievious by the spring season (Lentricchia 105).
Before attitudes can be discussed first the poem’s moral must be decided. “Mending Wall” does not take the approach of right and wrong, rather it shows two perspectives. There is the speaker who seeks a “release from the dull ritual of work each spring” and the farmer, “who is trapped by work and the New England past” (Lentricchia 106). Two different people coming together for a single cause, regardless of their varying backgrounds. The farmer may not have given proof of why the wall should stay, but then the speaker never presented his case of why the wall should not be continued. Frost allows our imagi
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