Mending Wall : Theme and Poetic Devises

Theme of the Poem.

Robert Frost's Mending Wall is symbolic. Walls are constructed for protection and safety. To keep away dangers and strangers. But it also stands for separation and segregation.

Mending wall presents two types of people.

The Wall Makers and The Wall Breakers.

The Traditionalists and those who wishes for change in the Society (The Radicals or Revolutionaries).

The haves and the have - nots.

The Natural forces and the Supernatural forces.

It is a fight man verses nature and divine elements. The man wants the wall but natural and supernatural forces breaks the wall.

Walls are against the natural order of things.

The very Nature conspires against the wall.

Nature does not like walls.

Walls stands for discrimination – walls of racial, religious, casteist, cultural, political, economic, geographical walls exist in the society.

Time and Place Produces people who pull down these walls.

Wall builders would try rebuilding the wall. It is a Sisyphean task.

Apparently the poet opposes building the wall but it is he that take the initiative. He informs the neighbour and fix a date to mend the wall.

There is a difference between a wall and a fence. The neighbour says good fences makes good neighbours and not a wall.

Poetics Style and Devices:

* The poet uses blank verse with great effect.

* Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter.

* An iamb is a metrical foot having two syllables: the first unstressed, or 'weak,' and the second stressed.

And on/ a day /we meet/ to walk /the line

And set/ the wall/ between /us once/ again.

* The style is conversational, and sometimes the poet is sarcastic and humourous.

* He is humourous when he pictures the neighbour as a stone age savage armed with weapon for hunting.

Figures of Speech:

Metaphor: He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

Alliteration: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

What I was walling in or walling out

Assonance: And spills the upper boulders in the sun

Personification: 1. Good fences make good neighbours. (Only humans can be neighbours).

2. Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it.

Simile : Like an old-stone savage armed

Inversion : Something there is ( There is something)

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The Sacred Turtles of Kandavu