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The Sacred Turtles of Kandavu

  The Sacred Turtles of Kandavu A Fijian Legend 1.     What is a legend? A legend is a very  old   story  or set of  stories  from  ancient   times about famous events or persons. These   stories are not always  true . 2.     Where does the story “The Scared Turtles of Kandavu” take place? The legend of the sacred turtles of Kandavu takes place in the Fijian island of Namuana. 3.     Fiji:  Fiji, a country in the South Pacific, is an archipelago (group of islands) of more than 300 islands. It's famed for rugged landscapes, palm-lined beaches and coral reefs with clear lagoons. 4.     How, according to the legend, did the warriors of Kadavu save themselves a long journey by sea? The Fijian islands are surrounded by sea. The legends says that the warriors of Kadavu saved the time for a long journey by sea, by sliding their canoes on rollers up over the narrow neck of land. 5.     What is the strange custom observed by the women of Namuana? The women of Namuan

Mending Wall : Robert Frost

 Analysis of the Poem.

A stone wall separates the speaker’s property from his neighbour’s. In every spring season the poet finds the wall broken. He informs his neighbour who lives across the hill. The two meets on a day to walk on either side of the wall and jointly make repairs. So Spring is a mending time.

The poet does not know what bring the wall down. He says that there is something that doesn’t love the wall. He believes that it may be the work of the rabbit hunters or tremors of frozen ground. Every year they find the wall damaged and together they make repairs.

In some places the speaker sees no reason for the wall to be kept—there are no cows to be contained, just apple and pine trees. He does not believe in walls for the sake of walls. 

The neighbour resorts to an old adage: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker remains unconvinced and mischievously presses the neighbor to look beyond the old-fashioned folly of such reasoning. His neighbour will not be swayed. The speaker thinks that his neighbour is from a justifiably outmoded era, a living example of a dark-age mentality.

The image at the heart of “Mending Wall” is a interesting : two men meeting on terms of civility and neighborliness to build a barrier between them. They do so out of tradition, out of habit. Yet the very earth conspires against them and makes their task Sisyphean. 

Sisyphus is the figure in Greek mythology condemned perpetually to push a boulder up a hill, only to have the boulder roll down again. 

These men push boulders back on top of the wall; yet just as inevitably, whether at the hand of hunters or elves, or the frost and thaw of nature’s invisible hand, the boulders tumble down again. Still, the neighbors persist. The poem, thus, seems to meditate conventionally on three grand themes: barrier-building (segregation, in the broadest sense of the word), the doomed nature of this enterprise, and our persistence in this activity regardless.

The speaker would have us believe that there are two types of people: those who stubbornly insist on building superfluous walls and those who would dispense with this practice — wall-builders and wall-breakers. The orthodox and radicals, who does not want change and those that want changes.

The speaker may scorn his neighbour’s obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters; it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. 

The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are cows,” for example. The speaker also derives some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building.  This wall-building act seems ancient, for it is described in ritual terms. It involves “spells” to counteract the “elves,” and the neighbor appears a Stone-Age savage while he hoists and transports a boulder.

There are different types of wall that exists in the society. Walls of religious, political, racial, cultural, economic and geographical nature that segregate people.

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